by Dana Spiotta
Back in ninth grade, her mother had tracked her phone with an app called Family Tracker. Nice idea/name. Her mother got notifications about what numbers Ally called and texted and at what time, even if the app didn’t reveal the content. What trust. Plus Ally was the last person in her grade to get a smartphone. Why? Because her mother had raised her as an effing Amish, was why, insisting on only a rudimentary flip phone for emergencies, which Ally lost several times, maybe somewhat (but totally unconsciously) on purpose. Ally had to admit that she was less mesmerized by what her smartphone offered than some of the kids in her class. By her fourteenth birthday and the presentation of her own device, it was a letdown, or maybe by that time she already maintained herself without her phone being an essential part of that maintenance. It changed little about her daily life except her parents called or texted her constantly and she could listen to Spotify when she went for a run. She could do homework, prepare her YAD papers on her phone using Google Docs when she was on the bus or waiting in line somewhere. Also she could look up ideas and words the moment she thought of them, which she liked. As for contacting friends, she only had two she actually trusted. And Ally was so used to not being part of Snapchat that she just never signed up. She had heard how some of the kids were really stressed out about maintaining streaks. Two boys had a streak going for over 380 days. And breaking a streak was some big—whatever, it was really stupid. Not being involved was a badge of maturity. And the AMA apps—kids setting themselves up for anonymous comments. Just inviting cruelty: “What is the best/worst thing about me?” They seemed to be asking for it. At first Ally thought they were sadly overestimating the kindness of anon hordes. Then she figured it out: mean attention was still attention. So as much as she would not admit it, maybe her early deprivation was good in some way. She was glad she cared little for her device. Until she met Joe. Until she had Joe.
Joe.
When everything else pissed her off, she thought of him and she felt better. Just his name, in her head, was enough. Although she sometimes mouthed his name, almost whispered it, just to feel it in her body. A kind of mantra. Mantras, she thought, were like a hymn, a way of turning words into abstract vibrations of meaning. The word started with the meaning, zoomed out into your body (your mouth, your ears) and then returned to the meaning, but with your whole body involved now.
Joe.
•N Nina. The dot by the name, pregnant with unread texts. She made herself savor the feeling.
•N Nina
my sweet girl! I miss u…
Joe texting her was new. Usually they spoke on the phone. She would go for a run and stop in the park so they could talk with no one overhearing. Every day she did this. He didn’t want to text. They had to be careful. She told him he was “Nina” and convinced him that it would be safe. In any case, the boundaries were breaking down; it had become impossible to resist crossing them for both of them.
Ally pressed the dot. Oh, the microsecond as it swiped to the left and sprang open.
The full text bubble filled the screen. And three bubbles below that. It was so exciting to get all these messages from him that she scanned them quickly and then forced herself to go slowly, read each one.
my sweet girl! I miss u, what r u doing?
She almost trembled. She was worried that one day she would see a text from Joe and she wouldn’t feel that blossoming inside her body. How did that work, could a feeling like that just go away one day? What a sad thing to notice—but she couldn’t imagine it fading. She gave up trying to read slowly.
can u send me a pic of yr beautiful face?
or any pic of any part of u? a perfect pinkie, perhaps?
(sorry, so flowery. yr fault.)
She knew what she was doing was dangerous, but it was also the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her. She had no idea that she could be this person, this adult. She had no idea that it was in her to be so bad, so reckless, so disobedient. It felt fantastic, it truly did, and she did not, as her mother would have had her believe, feel out of control or frightened. She felt utterly in control—her grades were perfect, but more than that, she had a new sense of herself. She looked in the mirror and could see joy radiating out of her. She felt alive to her future adult self. This glimpse gave her a confidence about what she knew. For example, virtually everything your parents tell you after the age of thirteen turns out to be false—if not a manipulation, then a distortion for some unstated higher purpose that they refuse to admit to. She wished the relevant and “wise” adults in her life just leveled with her, gave her a little room to decide what was good or dangerous. Besides, it wasn’t like Joe wasn’t taking a risk. She was almost seventeen and he was twenty-nine, so technically, it was statutory rape. But that word made her wince, not only because it didn’t remotely describe her experience, but also because it derived from “rapere,” which meant seizure of property. When women were considered property you could take. The truth was, again, the opposite. She was not anyone’s property, and Joe was not taking anything from her but, rather, giving her everything.
Sex was another thing that was not at all what everyone said it was. It wasn’t informed consent like in health class, a script of “can I” and “yes.” It was a suicide pact, and equal danger and transgression on both sides was part of what made it exciting. They both needed jeopardy for the connection to be equal. On her side, she could get found out by her parents. She could get pregnant. And if she sent him photos, he would have them, could make some kind of revenge porn out of them. Because the texting was going to include photos, wasn’t it? They both knew without saying that photos came with the texts. The thought of it, of the transgression, was part of the blooming feeling. The one thing everyone had drilled into her since fifth grade was not to send anyone naked photos, ever. Don’t believe boys when they promise never to show them to anyone or that they will delete them. But—and in this she was romantic, really, even if it sounded otherwise—she would send him photos. What was the point of sex and love if you didn’t trust the other person completely? If you were already gaming out the breakup and the “after” fallout, then you were just acting in bad faith.
She had read her Sartre, but she had also read her Kant, and she had read her Rawls. Or in any case, she had read their Wikipedia pages, which were quite extensive. She knew what bad faith was. What all the concerned adults advised was degrading, crude. Such as, if you do send a naked pic, never show your face with your body. Again, so cynical. They actually want you to disembody yourself, separate your identity from your body to “protect” you. Everything is doomed if you expect so little of the world. If you expect so little of other people. Besides, what are they protecting you from, even in the scenario that the snap finds its way out from his phone into the wider spheres of the internet? The humiliation (apparently profound and suicide-inducing) of having your body exposed. To be shown in a private act of desire. The message is clear: our “private” self must be a source of shame. And the photo will last forever, they warn. You can never scrub it once it is unleashed. Which used to terrify her. But she no longer felt that way, terrified. On the one hand, they say they want the culture to be “body positive,” but when you get down to it, the concerned adults are very wary of your body. Ally will be glad that when she is old, images of her young self will still be there for anyone who bothers to put her name in a search bar and click on Images.
Most of what everyone said didn’t really apply to her. She understood that now. Besides, Joe would not betray her, but even if he did, she would care more about what it meant about them than the actual fate of her digital images. So sending—the decision to send—photos was a fait accompli. Or at least a moot point. (Moot points were a go-to in her simulations—she understood that every proposition was arguable.)
The first time they met in private, in a hotel room, he was visiting Syracuse for business. Instead of staying downtown, he took a room at the Sy
racuse University Sheraton. That way it wasn’t so hard to get her dad to drop her at the nearby campus library, Bird, which was open until midnight and you didn’t need an ID or anything to get in. She explained that she was working on a research paper, which she pretty much always was, so that part wasn’t a lie. Plus now she had her license, so everything was getting easier.
The fact that Joe was one of her CMs (Citizen Mentors), one of her father’s friends actually, was not creepy. It was exciting. It was interesting. She got to know him through YAD, which arranged for promising young people to be mentored by community leaders and entrepreneurs (an etymologically disappointing word, it was simply derived from “entreprendre,” meaning “undertake” but also, if you dug deeper, “take in hand,” which made her laugh). Her father called it YAD like it rhymed with “cad,” even as Ally corrected him, “It is WHY AY DEE, not YAD.” “Then it should be punctuated like Y period A period D period,” her mother said, not looking up from her book.
“Exactly,” her father said, laughing. She hated when they bonded over making fun of things she took seriously. “What does Y-A-D stand for again?”
“Young American Dissidents,” her mother said.
“Young American Disrupters,” Ally said. “For god’s sake!”
Her mother looked up at her and smiled. “Disrupters. Right. Break stuff and all that.”
Ally sighed with weariness. “Innovators. They are not breaking things, but altering them from within. People with new ideas disrupting the world as they found it to change it for the better.”
“And what are they disrupting, really?”
“The status quo,” Ally said.
“Uh-huh. By dint of profit? By ‘building’ ”—and here her mother made air quotes—“businesses?”
“Look, you need to get out of your eighties mentality. Not everything worthwhile is about destroying capitalism.”
“But your mother is a Marxist, honey,” her father said. Both her parents cracked up at that. Ally sighed loudly and walked toward the door of the kitchen.
“I know,” her mother said, her voice low now because she was worried that Ally would leave in a huff. “I know you get a lot out of it. I just think the name is a bit much.”
Ally stopped. All of her books and her backpack weighed her down, so her turning back toward her parents made her wobble unsteadily. She spoke over her shoulder, her eyes trained on her mother:
“Not only are you operating from some woefully outdated paradigm. But you live here, in this house, in this suburb, the way you do, and you want me to be a dissident?”
“Dis ain’t your old-lady dissidence, Sam,” her father said, laughing.
Ally groaned loudly, turned toward the swinging kitchen door and pressed her book-and-backpack-laden body into it.
“C’mon, he’s joking,” her mother said.
“I’m mad at you, not him,” Ally said, now inexplicably furious.
Outside the kitchen, as if she couldn’t hear, her mother’s loud voice: “Naturally she’s mad at me and not you.”
“We really shouldn’t pick on YAD, I mean Y-A-D. We shouldn’t. It’s a very impressive organization,” he said.
“It’s a cult,” her mother said. Her stupid, unrepentant, big-mouthed mother. Could she never stop?
“C’mon,” her father said.
“It is. It has its own jargon, for god’s sake. Acronym-drunk Silicon Valley peen patois.”
“Tech bro bashing commence now,” he said.
“OVR—Optimal Virtue Ratios. Sharing Economics. Dynamic Evolution. Covert Scalability. Beta Blockchains. Internet of Backyard Things. SLA—Strategic Limited Accountability. Crowdsourced Actionable Intel—”
“Now you’re just making things up,” he said. “Platform-based Interrogations! Peer-to-Peer Haptics! Drone Epistemology!”
“Good one,” her mother said.
Much laughing. They really thought they were clever.
“Seriously, though, it is culty. They make her work so much that she is sleep deprived, easily indoctrinated. Disrupters, please. It’s a young strivers’ club pretending to be something exciting and new so young people will sign on.”
“Shhh,” her father said. But her mother was in full blabber mode.
“Do you know I saw her reading Ayn Rand? Where do you think she got that?”
Joe had given her the Rand. She tried to like it. At least Rand was a woman. It struck Ally as odd but fascinating that so many libertarian heroes were women. The foundational texts were women heavy. Oddest was Rose Wilder Lane, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter. She had written an important libertarian text, and maybe even ghostwrote her mother’s books (books that Ally’s mother had read aloud to her, books they devoured one after the other, rushing toward each night’s chapter like a secret pact between them). But Rose Wilder disappointed Ally. Her essays were not as good as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books, whoever wrote them. There was no life embedded in them, no—what was the word? Feeling? Bodies? Things? Just ideas and assertions.
“The Fountainhead. I never read it, but I remember this scene in the Gary Cooper movie.”
And now she admits she never even read it.
“Roark, the architect as superman, gets a big commission for his modernist maverick building design—so new, so pure—and then, in this very subtle complication, they say yes, you can build it, but you have to put this reproduction of the Parthenon all around the facade and totally compromise your superior vision—”
“I’m glad she’s reading it. Curiosity about the world is a good thing. You have to trust her to figure things out.”
Sure, that will be the day. Ally put her earbuds in.
One day Ally would tell her mom about Joe, and it would astonish her. Ally stared down at her message bubbles, her glowing, miraculous phone. Mom has no idea how far I am from her. She knew her mother imagined she would confide all her boy stuff to her, they would be like girls at a slumber party. Mom wanted that so badly. But it was very hard to give it to her or even to have enough room to admit that Ally kind of wanted that too. Just not yet; this was so completely hers, so exquisite in its compartment, in its isolation from the rest of her life.
3
As secret as she was about Joe, her YAD activities were very much entwined with her Joe activities. YAD used the word “enterprise” instead of “business.” Each rubric of the class involved studying with a disrupter, of which Joe was one. Some Citizen Mentors were designated as RLDs, Real Life Disrupters, people who operated within the business world but also remade it. Undertook an innovation of how people think of something at some fundamental level. (Undertaking made sense in this context, how “enterprise” came from “prehendere.”) It was about foundational questioning and imagination. It asks why can’t we find a way to make money and make something that moves the ball forward for the better. Everyone wins. Take the environment, for example. When she mentioned her nightmare about rising sea levels, about living in a waterlogged, forever-flooded future, with she herself sitting on a roof waiting to be rescued as the filthy water rose and rose until she woke up sweaty and damp, Joe told her that entrepreneurs will find ways to mitigate the effects of climate change. There is so much money to be made that the best minds will be on it as long as no one hems them in. The hive mind, the genius of economic incentive combined with the power at stake, will unleash the brilliance of GDE (Goal-Driven Enterprise). There will be a Bill Gates of climate Armageddon. You know it, Ally. The capacity is right around the corner, he said, and maybe it was true. Real Life Disrupters looked for the bigger cultural, even social, impacts. And real financial viability. An essential element of RLDs was that they succeeded—yes, they made money, because that was a clear measure of success, and it meant that it was sustainable—and as a consequence of the successful enterprise, the landscape of the status quo was permanently altered, broken and
then remade. Break Things and Make Things was Joe’s update of that notorious edict.
Joe was a developer who worked on renovating and repurposing existing structures “with preservationist sensitivity.” As he explained in his presentation to her YAD class, he was expert at marshaling the available tax-abatement and exemption programs as well as historical property and economic-development grants at the city, county, and state levels. Although he was based in New York City, he had put together a deal for the historic but ruined James Hotel downtown. It had been built in 1915, was once grand, but fell into low years with a 1970s cheapo update, then became a sad nightclub, then a failed restaurant, until it was finally shuttered five years ago, another abandoned building downtown. Through Joe’s intervention, it became a Hilton property, with all the contemporary corporate standards that name suggested, but it was nonetheless brought back to its former glory with a tasteful and accurate restoration. Even her mother admitted it was glorious. Unlike so many building renovations, she said, this one has a real sensibility, a relation to history. Before Joe was appointed as her CM, Ally had met him through her parents. Ally’s father was one of Joe’s lawyers, and so all three of them went to the hotel’s opening. The lobby had been restored with all of its original fixtures, huge gilt chandeliers with many small exposed bulbs, like the lights at Grand Central in New York City. Also intact were the original Stickley wood cages for the front desk check-in, including wood mailboxes for each guest room. Naturally her mother had an orgasm when she heard the name “Stickley.” “The coup de grâce,” Joe said, “is over here.” Ally noticed that he looked unexpectedly young and cute, and she also registered that she actually found a guy in a suit sexy. He gestured to a large mural covering one whole wall.