Audio: Mary South reads.
The rapist is such an inspiration that he started a newsletter to share his story. He chronicles his transformation from a nerdy duckling into the muscular entrepreneur swan he is today. The newsletter began as a motivational tool for his annual charity triathlon, but it has become much, much more. It’s a meditation on health, tech, spirituality, culture, and, of course, pushing through limitations and not understanding the meaning of the word “no.” The woman has been following the rapist on social media since the rape, though her accounts don’t officially “follow” the rapist. When the woman accidentally liked a post, she achieved a new personal best in self-hatred, just as the rapist was achieving a new personal best in his triathlon. She imagined the rapist receiving a notification of the like and considering it proof that the rape had been consensual. The rapist works for the most prestigious seed fund in Silicon Valley, which is a fact the woman finds funny in retrospect. The woman works as a content moderator at the world’s most popular search engine, in a room with no windows or ventilation system, shoulder to shoulder with unfortunate souls.
Content moderation is unending warfare. So says the woman’s boss, Shady Dave. As soon as you’ve defeated one set of troops, another is ready to take its place, and thus the battle ever endures, wave after wave, ad infinitum. If it were possible to add up the number of streaming hours in existence, the sum would probably exceed the age of the universe. That’s what Shady Dave tells the newbies at orientation. Basically, the woman had better stop procrastinating by scrutinizing the rapist’s digital persona and return to the trenches. She minimizes her browser and signs in to the screening panel—a term that’s eerily close, she often thinks, to screaming panel. While it loads, the opening progress bar reminds her what she should be eliminating: hate speech, gore, torture, pornography both adult and child, horrific traffic accidents, executions carried out by terrorists. The woman has been at this job long enough that she remembers time not only in the usual way, by seasons and holidays, but also by the content that has most traumatized her to delete.
In the employee handbook, the woman’s position is listed as “digital-media curator,” as if she were an assistant at an art gallery or a graphic designer for a winery. Indeed, she has become a veritable sommelier of beheadings. Unofficially, the woman and her cohorts have been dubbed “ninjas” because they kill content without being heard or seen. She moves into the violation column of her screaming panel a homeless veteran panhandling—which the woman knows he is because his sign says “HOMELESS VETERAN, PLEASE HELP”—as he’s crushed by a speeding drunk driver. Next, she moves an extreme closeup of masturbation with a Batman figurine. A co-worker, catching a glimpse, proclaims, “To the Batcave!” Shady Dave makes his signature big-brain-on-tech-campus entrance.
“Hello, my pretty little firewalls,” he says, turning on a dusty screen upon which someone has traced a dick. “I bring you another chapter in our cherished national pastime, fun with guns.” He ponders that statement for a second and adds, “Trigger warning.” While the clip buffers, the outline of the dust dick glows like a phallic halo. An attractive blond local-news reporter with an attractive-reporter haircut is interviewing a stately older woman in a blazer, some sort of authority figure, about a folk-music festival when a hand holding a gun appears—it becomes obvious that the shooter is doing the filming, and that’s why it’s so shaky—takes aim at the reporter, and fires, then at the stately older woman, then at the reporter’s cameraman. The older woman collapses. The reporter runs. The cameraman drops the camera. There’s blood. It’s revealed that the shooter is a disgruntled colleague who was let go from the station and uploaded this clip to social media.
“This is an American tragedy,” Shady Dave says. “I don’t want people to remember it tomorrow. Are there any questions?”
“Yeah,” someone replies. “I want to know when you’re going to make us eligible for full employee benefits and not contractor benefits.”
“Shut the fuck up, BabyJesusUpchuck,” Shady Dave chides him, lovingly—sort of.
BabyJesusUpchuck rolls his eyes and returns to scouring public photo streams. Like many digital-media curators at the world’s most popular search engine, BabyJesusUpchuck goes by his Internet handle rather than by his real name. Also like many others, BabyJesusUpchuck has trouble making ends meet and thus has a side gig. He hunts for user-generated advertising on behalf of corporations and is always copy-pasting comments such as “NATURE’S BUMPERS™ would like to use this heartwarming picture of your baby to promote our eco-friendly, biodegradable diaper brand. Please reply #BABYOK if you agree.” Someone with the username Cunty does online reputation management for convicted sex offenders and those who have posted videos of themselves jokingly flipping off the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier but would like to have jobs. The woman is the odd man out both in that she doesn’t have a side gig and in that she is a woman.
The woman doesn’t “follow” the rapist on social media, but she does follow the rapist in real life. Maybe because she spent the day repeatedly burying the same double homicide, she finds herself in front of the headquarters of the rapist’s seed fund and waits on a relatively concealed bench until she sees him head out. He talks animatedly with some fellow douche bags and actually gives one of them a high five before sallying forth into the sunset for the Caltrain. As surreptitiously as possible for a woman who is a ninja at the world’s most popular search engine but not a real ninja, she tails him onto the Caltrain, then onto the BART at Millbrae. When he gets off the train at the Mission, which is where he lives, she does, too. The rapist jogs into his building and comes back out with his dog. The woman is annoyed that a rapist can be the owner of such a sweet dog. Shouldn’t the dog of a rapist always be marking its territory on said rapist’s bed or something?
He walks his dog, pausing to pick up its poop, then ties the dog to the rusted corpse of a bicycle so he can have a beer. While imbibing his refreshing brew and swiping at his phone, the rapist occasionally catches the dog’s eye and smiles. At each smile, the dog raises its haunches and wags its tail. The woman observes this adorable interlude with disgust from a street corner while pretending to be engrossed in her phone. Upon finishing his beverage, he unties the dog, only to retie it outside a grocery store. She sneaks behind him through the aisles, composing a mental shopping list of what the rapist places in his basket: an onion, long-grain rice, shredded cheddar cheese, ground beef, extra-virgin olive oil. The rapist gropes bell peppers, thick-skinned and red. Buying the same items he bought, the woman muses, These are the bell peppers that the rapist rejected.
Another installment of the newsletter has been sent out, and she reads it on her way home. “Dear Internet Diary,” he begins. The rapist begins each newsletter as if he were scribbling in a private diary, although it’s a public newsletter. “Today, I learned the statistic that more people have died this year from taking selfies than from shark attacks. These include a man who was gored to death while running from the bulls in Spain, two guys who blew themselves up grinning with a grenade in the Ural Mountains, and a Singaporean tourist who fell off a cliffside in Bali.” He continues in the next paragraph, “The reason I don’t take selfies is the reason I refuse to use fitness trackers. If you’re fixated on monitoring your heart rate, you forget to listen to the beating of your heart. Let’s stop storing images in the cloud’s memory and start storing them in our biological memories. Until we lose our minds in old age, that is, but hopefully by then there will be a medical solution or an app that disrupts dementia. Death to the selfie.”
Later, the rapist posts a picture of his dinner captioned “famous family stuffed bell peppers yum,” and the woman debates whether that counts as a selfie. She prepares her own batch of stuffed bell peppers per the instructions of a recipe rated five stars by numerous reviewers, but hers taste like a bunch of turds roasted inside a vegetable. That evening, she has horrible diarrhea, for which she blames the rapist. Her sister’s diapered toddler laughs at her from an ornate frame as she strains over the bowl. It occurs to her that her sister’s baby would be a good addition to the #BABYOK campaign. The woman has been living in her sister’s house, sleeping in her sister’s bed, eating her sister’s condiments, and driving her sister’s electric car in Palo Alto while her sister and her husband and baby live abroad in a Scandinavian socialist paradise, and the woman should be grateful, but her sister sends texts like “The baby is with the government-subsidized nanny while we lie on the beach and drink and have uninterrupted sex on vacation in the Maldives. Have we received any important mail?”
Instead of cleaning up, the woman puts the remaining peppers and the dirty dishes on the deck for the mountain lion. The Mountain View mountain lion has been the talk of the Valley. Hungry and lonely, the big cat descended from its natural hunting grounds high in the Santa Cruz Mountains in search of food and friendship. It was spotted in full view of the doe-eyed software engineers travelling in from San Francisco aboard the world’s most popular search engine’s shuttle bus. It was spotted digging through garbage at the farmers’ market. The woman is also positive that she saw it stalking her sister’s eerily quiet electric car during her commute, as if it were her spirit animal, a claim that was met with relentless co-worker mockery. For its efforts, the mountain lion has been awarded its own social-media accounts, where it posts snarky industry gossip; a buggy game where it wanders around mauling investors; and a crowdfunding campaign for kitty treats.
Satisfyingly, the peppers have disappeared when she wakes up in the a.m. and checks the deck. Disappeared isn’t quite accurate: the peppers have been ransacked, pots and pans overturned, grains of rice scattered as if at a kegger wedding. Though she realizes that the culprit could be a rowdy squirrel or a posse of raccoons, the woman feels validated—until, that is, she’s edging out of the driveway and the neighborhood hooligans body slam the trunk of her sister’s electric car. The neighbor kids have had a vendetta against the woman ever since she nearly killed one of their own. She was turning onto their street just as the kid did a trick on his skateboard and wiped out. He escaped with his life by the thinnest of hoodie strings as she ran over the board and wrecked it. Now they shout obscenities and throw objects in her direction, and the woman is too concerned for her safety to attend any block parties or barbecues. Still, it’s nice to see them bullying physically. She thought kids these days only bothered with cyberbullying.
There’s another mass shooting, causing everyone to forget about the local-news-channel shooting. Footage of this mass shooting isn’t uploaded, but the shooter did post a clip of himself ranting about his horniness slash failure to get pussy, and how he was going to walk into a university lecture hall and pump bullets into the career-driven feminists who deemed themselves too good for him and caused his pussylessness. Shady Dave categorizes it as inflammatory hate speech, and the ninjas synch it for removal in their screaming panels. A popular media-gossip columnist takes a screenshot of the shooter’s online dating profile. From the profile, the woman ascertains that the shooter is a Scorpio, that he is both more conservative and more sex-driven than other males in his demographic, and that he’s been told that his piercing blue eyes are his most noticeable feature. The tagline in his bio is “Will you visit me in prison?” Feminists who speak out against the shooting are doxxed, their home addresses, employers, and cell-phone numbers smeared across online bulletin boards with warnings to behave or brave the wrath of alpha males.
“The hashtag #KillFeminists is trending,” someone says.
“Some of these hate mentions of feminists are so nasty they’re making me blush, and I watch people get disemboweled for a living,” someone else says.
Shady Dave strolls in and tells them they can be quiet or they can lick his immense scrotum.
“Where are we with the ASS situation?” The ninjas in the room look at him like, duh. “BabyJesusUpchuck? Cunty? Someone? I want to nail this ASS!”
I AM ASS, spelled in all caps, isn’t a singular entity but a plurality. ASS, which is their name for themselves, not the ninjas’ name for them, is an élite band of hackers who work for the Agency, a highly secretive online propaganda organization, a.k.a. disinformation combat unit, a.k.a. troll farm, based in Russia and mandated to sow chaos and to commit general assholery in the United States. ASS has fabricated a gas explosion in Colorado, an Ebola outbreak in Massachusetts, and an incident of police brutality prompted by real police brutality in Missouri, using fake screenshots, photographs, and news footage that are then spammed at random as well as at targeted, gullible opinion leaders, like politicians and former reality-television stars. ASS also spouts racist, misogynistic, and nonsensical babble in comments sections wherever and whenever ASS can register a username without too much scrutiny.
The woman hasn’t had the stomach for online dating since she met the rapist, but, thanks to the shooter’s profile and I AM ASS, a trick occurs to her that wouldn’t have otherwise. She loads the site that introduced her to the rapist, signs out of her former self, and comes up with a new identity. Who would strike the rapist’s fancy? Someone smart but not potential competition, someone attractive but not threatening. Like BabyJesusUpchuck toiling on the #BABYOK campaign, she crawls through public photo streams searching for lives to steal, settling on that of a cute sophomore at Stanford. As soon as the Frankenprofile is good to go, she lets the rapist know she’s interested by clicking the button that says “Let him know you’re interested.” The rapist replies with “Hey.” And then, brilliantly, “What’s up?”
She knows the rapist so well that it isn’t difficult to keep his attention. His favorite band is the Kinks, so she tells him that her favorite band is the Kinks. He likes winter but not summer, baths but not showers, hardback books but not paperbacks. He likes whiskey, dogs, leather belts, escalators, and pocket watches. He dislikes mezcal, cats, cologne and any other artificial scents, elevators, and wristwatches. The rapist is a man of unique tastes, an iconoclast. She tells him that she likes or dislikes most of these things, and he, in turn, tells her some things she already knows, like the fact that he was an only child and relentlessly teased. He tells her some things she doesn’t know, too. He is the son of a mentally unstable mother who was an addict, and he was raised by his maternal grandparents, whom he calls Mom and Dad. That’s why he doesn’t want children. The rapist believes it’s better to try to be good to those who are here now.
Their communication feels much more intimate than the communication they exchanged when the woman was herself. Resentfully, she starts introducing real details to see if he notices. After her own mother was diagnosed with metastasized breast cancer, the woman dropped out of school until her mom passed away and is currently a squatter in her sister’s house doing content moderation at the world’s most popular search engine. Her father remarried and moved to Florida, and most of the time when she hears from him it’s a forwarded e-mail from his new wife about her craft shop, where she sells dirty-silly ironic needlepoint. One of her pillows has the cursive catchphrase “I’d rather be golfing!” above swingers at a retirement community having a foursome on a green while their caddies watch and fondle the clubs. Another depicts two cannibals enjoying a pizza with severed human limbs for toppings above the tagline “Meat Lovers Pizza.” The rapist asks when the two of them can meet. But if they were her stepmom’s cannibals, he witticizes, he’d ask when they can meat.
Unsure what to do at this juncture of the deception, the woman doesn’t reply for several days. Into the void of her silence, the rapist sends a lone question mark. She is about to delete the fake profile when, by some kind of satanic serendipity, Madison appears in her screaming panel. The video is called Madison because that’s where the scandal occurred a few years ago—Madison, Wisconsin—but the anonymous girl has also become known as Madison. Madison is a female name. The girl’s name might as well be Madison. Madison the video shows a girl passed out at a party as football players finger her and joke that she is so raped. A Madison judge ruled that Madison the girl was raped and convicted the football players of forcible digital penetration. Maybe Cunty could help them with their search results when they get out of prison. Though the Madison scandal is ancient browser history, the woman’s outrage is continually refreshed. Last time she came across Madison, she had to go home feeling unwell.
Cunty, sipping his coffee, comes up behind the woman, as if psychically sensing that he might be needed to rescue someone’s reputation, and idly leers at Madison.
“That’s amazing, Madison is still kicking around,” he says. The woman queues Madison in the violation column in her screaming panel.
“I swear if I ever marry and my woman pops out some brats, I’m raising them Amish,” he continues—not just for her benefit but for the benefit of the group, though he doesn’t budge from his buzzard-hovering over the woman. “Can you imagine if that were your daughter? I never want to be in a situation where I’m looking at my daughter’s vagina online and thinking, Her vagina isn’t as hot as a hacked celebrity-vagina candid.”
“You have to be so careful,” BabyJesusUpchuck replies. “The Internet is forever.”
“After we’re dead and rotting in the ground or cremated and turned to ash, our vaginas will still be on a server somewhere for everyone to see,” Cunty says.
Sometimes, after too many hours in front of her screaming panel, the woman will start to float above her own body, as those who have had near-death experiences or been the victims of a crime—rape, for example—claim to have done, aware that it will end but forced to wait until that end. The woman feels that same floaty sensation as she signs in to the dating site and types her reply to the rapist: To be honest, she writes him, she doesn’t know if she’s ready to date. Not so long ago, she met a man on this site. After they went out a couple of times, he asked her up to his place. Though she was interested in him, she wasn’t interested in sex that soon. When she first said no, he respected her boundaries, but he didn’t heed the second no. The man pinned her hands with one of his hands and then ripped apart her lace panties, not troubling to undo her clothes. She was wearing a vintage calfskin leather skirt and a silk peasant top printed with flowers. It is the most expensive outfit she owns, and she can no longer put it on. As she was retreating from him post-rape, the man said that she was missing something, and he threw her ruined underwear in her face. In conclusion, the woman would like to ask, Do you remember me?
Anxious after hitting Send, the woman stares at her messages waiting for something to happen while she tries to determine what she hoped to accomplish with this fake profile and correspondence scheme. Did she want the rapist to acknowledge that he is a rapist? An apology? Professions of love? For him to kill himself? What she gets is nothing. The rapist ghosts. Her need for a reply, if only a nasty one, becomes more urgent and not less. She follows the rapist online and in real life with greater persistence. She rereads each digital clue he leaves and then rereads the rereads. She watches him take lunches, do drinks, socialize. She watches him train for his next charity triathlon, buy bright new drapes about which she wishes she could, but can’t, make a carpet-matching-the-drapes quip, walk his dog, recycle, be a well-adjusted individual and valuable member of the community. Confrontation is her fantasy: knocking on the rapist’s door and, when he opens it, bluntly informing him, “Hi, you raped me.”
The only positive from her constant supervision of the rapist is that she has confirmed that he’s not getting any ass, lowercase, despite hanging with his bros in the city’s trendiest establishments and his activity on the dating site, which greatly pleases the woman, but good things must come to an end the same as those bad things, though the woman isn’t sure that bad things do come to an end, at least not for her. She watches as the rapist leaves his apartment with extra excitement in his step, only to escort someone back to his place soon thereafter. When the woman sees his lights turn off, she is too upset to stay, but she also can’t not contemplate what’s probably happening. Rapes that occur after her rape are her fault. The woman could have stopped these rapes if she hadn’t been so stupid, if she had been swabbed, combed for rapist debris, photographed, and documented, the evidence of her rape then added to the stash of rape kits that require testing and are stored until who knows when.
Guilt feels almost like a physical weight, as if the rapist is on top of her as she tosses and turns on her sister’s mattress, and she can’t sleep. The sun hasn’t risen, and there she is again, standing in front of the rapist’s building until one of those serious tricked-out runner types emerges and she can glide in. She’s about to knock on the rapist’s apartment door, but what if he doesn’t answer? What if she catches him in the act? What if the intercourse is consensual? What if the rapist’s dog bites her? Investigation reveals a spare key duct-taped under his welcome doormat. Of course he has a key there, because the rapist never feels the need to worry about someone assaulting him. Maybe it would be better to rob him or break his belongings in revenge. This moment of hesitation is enough for her to lose her resolve. Instead of knocking, she rests her head on the door and cries and cries. When her skin touches the wooden surface, she could swear that it is warm.
Turnover is always high in the content-moderation department at the world’s most popular search engine, yet it does tend to cause a bit of a fuss when someone has a nervous breakdown or theatrically quits with a tirade about the disgusting ubiquity of injustice and how he will not sit on his tushy and wipe clean this corporate palimpsest of evil one second longer (though someone once opted to direct his rage into an incredibly foul letter to the C.E.O. that went viral). Lately, the word around campus is that their jobs are being relocated to Manila, where a family of five can purchase a month’s worth of groceries on a fraction of the salary that doesn’t last a week of brunch and yoga classes in the Bay Area. BabyJesusUpchuck and Cunty take bets on who will be the last ninja standing. “You,” they say to the woman. “We didn’t expect you to last a week.”
Shady Dave holds a status meeting to confront the rumor that their jobs are moving to an overseas online sweatshop. Yes, the decision to downsize was made, he says, but that doesn’t mean that they should tinker with the font on their résumés or degrade themselves by applying for a position at the Genius Bar. Rather than taking drastic measures, management is compassionately allowing the department to dwindle until its ultimate demise, as if it were a diseased limb on a tree of ones and zeros. Personally, he’s not happy about the move, he confesses. For what it’s worth, he’ll be transferred to the targeted-advertising team, where it’s, like, “We saw you were interested in this anal lubricant. Customers who bought butt lube also purchased this kombucha tea.” Besides, at some point in the not so distant future, these positions won’t exist at all, not for them, not for Filipinos. The algorithm will become sophisticated enough to supervise on its own the worst that humanity has to offer.
Too long; the woman didn’t listen. As far as she’s concerned, someone among them could commit a mass shooting at this moment and decorate their screaming panels with the insides of their entire team. Why should she care when she has found out that the rapist is in a relationship? Prior to this status meeting, the rapist tweaked his bios and status across social media. When she logged in to the dating site and his profile had disappeared, she knew: his failure to reply to her message wasn’t on account of guilt, or the fear that she would press charges if he admitted to the rape, or any of the other excuses she thought of on his behalf, like that he was dying from flesh-eating bacteria. The rapist didn’t bother to write back because he’d got a girlfriend. The rapist’s girlfriend confirms this gut instinct by commenting, surrounded by hearts, on each of his posts, “They say it’s not real until it’s on the Internet. We’re exclusive!”
The rapist’s girlfriend is hot. The rapist’s girlfriend is probably whom the woman cried for the night she thought the rapist was raping another woman. The rapist’s girlfriend is studying interactive telecommunications, and her master’s thesis is an avant-garde app. The rapist’s girlfriend’s app is called Tender Buttons, and what the app does is instruct the user to enact a ritual with another user who is pinpointable via G.P.S. “Find Phil and tell him he matters” is an example of what the rapist’s girlfriend’s app could command, or “Attempt handstands with Nancy in Golden Gate Park,” or the idiosyncratically titillating “Take turns using a riding crop to beat a sofa that’s been left for curbside trash with Gary.” On the rapist’s girlfriend’s Web site, there is an excessively long description of the app’s origins:
“Tender Buttons is the hypothetical love child born from the union of TaskRabbit, which allows someone with the app to hire someone else with the app to complete small jobs or ‘tasks,’ and Joseph Beuys’s legendary performance piece ‘How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare.’ We have apps for delivering gourmet meals to our doorsteps, apps for washing our shit-stained underwear, apps that find us fresh genitals to fuck, apps to maximize our investments and minimize our waistlines, apps to one-up our peers by posting pictures of our filtered lives, but practically no apps that enable random encounters without hope of reward. This app is the only app on the market intended purely to solve the problem of loneliness.” The woman thinks it is pretty great that she is still stress-eating while obsessing over the rapist on her sister’s baby-stained sofa while the rapist is in love with a sexy programmer artist who wants to use technology to facilitate more hugs.
She gets why the rapist raped her and presumably didn’t rape the rapist’s girlfriend, because the rapist’s girlfriend is cool and, pre-rape, the woman was ordinary, not cool. The rapist’s girlfriend and the woman would possibly have been friends if they didn’t have the rapist in common and had met at a party or a meetup. It’s irrelevant, though, the woman thinks, since the woman lost the skill set for making friends, and the stuff she likes—for example, the Kinks—is stuff she’s discovered through her surveillance of the rapist, and she hates it when someone she hates has occasional good taste. A rapist should have bad taste. The woman doesn’t know what she would have liked on her own or even what she would have “liked.” Who would she have become if she had never been raped? Before the rape, the woman had studied art history. She liked Jenny Holzer and Yasumasa Morimura. She could spend hours in a room sketching or thinking only about herself. She cared about things like grades and jobs, about color theory and museums and steps walked in a day. But that version of her seems like a fraud.
In terms of quotation-mark “likes,” the rapist’s and the rapist’s girlfriend’s feeds blow up when the San Francisco Chronicle prints a feature in which both are quoted, and which they both rampantly share and like. “The Mission District is the city’s oldest district,” it states, “home to the Ohlone before Spanish conquest, then immigrants from around the globe—specifically, the Italians, the Germans, the Irish, and the Latino community. Until a new generation of intrepid settlers arrived: the tech élite, armed with impressive pedigrees and startup cash. These privileged gentrifiers are raising median rents and often, as real-estate developers use the morally dubious machinations of illegal evictions and underhanded buyouts, forcing out longtime tenants. Those tenants’ struggle to stay in an area that holds a lifetime of memories is frequently met with mixed feelings.” This is the point in the article where the rapist and the rapist’s girlfriend come in.
“Techies are the latest REM cycle in the American dream,” the rapist declares, cleverly. “We’re making the lives of these people better,” he continues. “These people” reads like an insult, not unlike when the rapist uses “girls” when he means women. “A friend of mine invented an app to fight hunger and food waste simultaneously. To date, his app has distributed more than half a million meals that would otherwise have been thrown out.” The rapist, the article clarifies, though it doesn’t refer to him as the rapist, resides with his self-described live-in girlfriend in a sleek, remodelled loft on Folsom Street, in the middle of the Mission District. They came home late after a concert recently to find the words “JOB CREATORS” spray-painted across the front of their building. “I prefer the new method of tagging walls to the old,” the rapist’s girlfriend interjects, cleverly. They are so clever. The rapist’s girlfriend posts a selfie of the rapist and the rapist’s girlfriend pointing and laughing at “JOB CREATORS.” The rapist might not be that into it, but the rapist’s girlfriend is definitely a believer in the selfie. The woman passes by the building and sees a Latino man scrubbing the graffiti off the façade.
It’s the rapist and the rapist’s girlfriend’s half anniversary—six inseparable months already, how time flies when you’re in love!—and to celebrate they plan to dine at East Meets West, a pricey concept joint that’s an homage to Mexican taco trucks and Japanese street-cart fare. The woman arrives early, just as it is opening, in fact, and stakes out a seat that’s excellent for spying. By the time the rapist and the rapist’s girlfriend waltz in for their eight-o’clock reservation, she is tipsy. They begin with a bottle of champagne, though they barely touch it, preferring to concentrate on the touching of their knees under the table, the rapist’s girlfriend reaching to stroke the inside of the rapist’s thigh, the rapist caressing the very tips of her fingertips. The rapist and the rapist’s girlfriend are drunk on their happiness, and the woman is drunk on vodka. Trays of tacos rolled like sushi and sushi rolls spread out like tacos emerge, as colorful and ostentatious as if they were floats in a miniature, culturally appropriative carnival, winding their way through the restaurant and into the triumphant gullets of the rapist and the rapist’s girlfriend.
Distracted by the rapist’s tongue as it darts to snatch flavor from his lips, and by his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows, the woman wonders, What if the rapist’s girlfriend, instead of nonchalantly sampling the expensive small bites and the champagne, ate the rapist for their anniversary? The rapist’s girlfriend could begin with an amuse-bouche of the rapist’s Adam’s apple, devouring it in one gulp as if it were a cut of tuna sashimi. Next, a lightly braised trio of rapist-tongue tacos. To prepare the main course, the rapist’s girlfriend will grip the rapist by the balls and compress them until they pop! With a sound identical to the sound of a tube of tennis balls opening, the rapist’s balls will bounce across the floor. Waitstaff will skitter around chasing the balls, to be simmered in a hearty broth with ramen noodles. For the pièce de résistance: a dessert of the rapist’s penis, split like a plantain and sautéed with condensed milk until it melts in the mouth.
A toast! To six more amazing months. The rapist and the rapist’s girlfriend share a passionate kiss. A wave of nausea crashes against the woman, though whether it’s prompted by the kiss, or the vodka, or her vision of the rapist’s girlfriend cannibalizing him like a character from her stepmom’s pillows, or a combination of the three, it’s impossible to guess. She dry heaves over a toilet in the bathroom, which has the vibe of a quinceañera set in a Zen garden. When she emerges from the stall, utterly spent, unable to throw up, emptied out of emptiness itself, the rapist’s girlfriend is by the sinks reapplying her makeup. The woman stands there staring for what must be a strange span of time because the rapist’s girlfriend meets her eyes in the mirror and raises her eyebrows like, Hey, Creepy McStaringlady, take a selfie, it’ll last longer. The woman’s feet shuffle her to the sink beside the rapist’s girlfriend, and the woman’s hands wash her hands, and the woman’s vocal cords vocalize.
“You look nice,” the woman says.
“Thanks,” the rapist’s girlfriend says.
“Special occasion?”
“Anniversary.”
“Lucky guy.”
“I’m the one who’s lucky.”
The rapist’s girlfriend has no idea that she is dating a rapist. Should the woman say something? Although the rapist may not have raped his girlfriend yet, that doesn’t mean he won’t. If something does go down, she might at least recall this conversation and hopefully not blame herself so much.
“Not to get stalkery, but didn’t you create the app Tender Buttons?”
The woman is stalkery, but the rapist’s girlfriend doesn’t know that.
“Wow, you know Tender Buttons. I am the creator!”
The rapist’s girlfriend’s ego seems to grow three sizes, like the Grinch’s heart, if the Grinch’s heart were already enormous.
“Congratulations.”
“How do you like the app?”
“I don’t know how to properly communicate this, but I met someone through the app who raped me.”
The woman doesn’t feel great blaming the rape on the rapist’s girlfriend’s app, like it’s a fart and she’s blaming it on the dog, a circumstance with which the rapist is probably also familiar, but the truth is out of the question. The rapist’s girlfriend wouldn’t believe her, or she would, but she’d be so disturbed by the woman’s behavior that she wouldn’t.
“I’m so sorry that happened to you.”
The rapist’s girlfriend angles her eyebrows in forlorn, sisterly solidarity. She takes the woman’s hands in her hands and squeezes them gently.
“Aren’t you concerned that your app might be used for sinister purposes?”
“I worried about that a lot when it was in the initial stages. The reality is that any app, such as a hookup app, can be used to manipulate and hurt others, primarily women. I figured, isn’t it better to try to foster human connection than not?”
The woman stares into the pools of bottomless remorse and empathy that are the rapist’s girlfriend’s eyes. She is utterly sincere; the woman can tell. The rapist’s girlfriend truly believes that she and the rapist are making the world a better place.
“I don’t understand why we need more tools to connect with others. Sometimes we don’t know the people we already know. The guy you’re with, the guy who makes you feel lucky to be in love, that guy could turn out to be a rapist.”
The rapist’s girlfriend is taken aback, and she drops the woman’s hands.
“I appreciate that you must be in a lot of pain, but he would never do that.”
“What if I told you he was the one who raped me?”
“My personal life is none of your business, and I don’t like being harassed in the john.”
“I was fostering human connection!”
In hindsight, the john, so dubbed by the rapist’s girlfriend, wasn’t the best venue for that ostensibly casual showdown, because the woman has to wait there for the rapist and the rapist’s girlfriend to pay and anniversarize elsewhere if she doesn’t want to risk the rapist’s girlfriend pointing her out to the rapist. How she wishes there were a “view source” option for human beings; she could locate the phrase “This is a rapist” in between brackets and thus duly inform the rapist’s girlfriend. She lets pass what seems like a purgatorial amount of time, but when she finally returns to her seat the rapist and the rapist’s girlfriend are exactly where she left them. The rapist’s girlfriend whispers to the rapist, and the rapist spots the woman and looks as stricken and trapped as the anime piñata in the Zen-quinceañera bathroom, though he recovers quickly. The woman is crazy, he says, no doubt that’s what he says, they went out and were intimate, intimate is undoubtedly how he puts it, and when he wasn’t into her afterward she started tracking him on the Internet like the N.S.A., half the hits on his Web site are from her I.P. address, she created a fake dating profile to talk to him, and it’s no coincidence she’s here when they’re here, though he didn’t think she’d take her crazy IRL.
She hightails it out of that concept restaurant—that’s how the woman reacts to the rapist’s lies: she flees the scene, not stopping to collect her credit card or settle her tab—and she methodically paces the streets of the Mission, east on one street, west on another, as though she were the camera-mapping car for the world’s most popular search engine. She finds herself in front of a loft where it’s still possible to trace the outline of “JOB CREATORS” if you know what to look for, and she finds herself in the elevator, and then she finds herself detaching the key from under the rapist’s welcome mat and entering the rapist’s apartment, where she is decidedly not welcome. The woman finds herself stripping down to nothing and crawling into the rapist’s bed, to reclaim a space where she was violated, as though that would help, and the rapist’s dog jumps into bed with her and licks her face. The rapist’s dog nestles against her stomach, and the mammalian comfort is so nice—and the woman hasn’t felt affection since she can’t remember when—that the woman falls asleep.
“The homeless situation in this city is gross. I wish we had laws that made it illegal to be homeless.” The woman wakes to the rapist’s girlfriend complaining as they enter the rapist’s rapeloft. O.K., the rapist’s girlfriend is awful, which makes the woman feel a little bit better, but then she’s overwhelmed by her predicament. She’s out of bed and dressing herself as if her life depended on it, which it very well could, since the rapist’s girlfriend cries, “I know who you are!” and whips her phone out like a gun from its holster and starts recording while the woman pulls on her pants and top, not even bothering with her underwear, which she stuffs in her purse. The rapist, for his part, is backing away like he’s just encountered the Mountain View mountain lion. It was a mistake for the woman not to tell her story to the rapist’s girlfriend. Now the rapist gets to control the narrative. This moment is her opportunity to rally all her courage and make the accusation “Rapist!” But instead the woman is stumbling away from this place in shame one more time, the last time, though not before hearing the rapist’s girlfriend’s threat:
“Just remember, I can show this to the cops. Or I can upload this footage of you wherever I want.”
The Mountain View mountain lion has been all but forgotten except by the woman. Weeks without sightings mean that other cat memes have replaced her in the online collective consciousness. The woman senses that the Mountain View mountain lion is a she. Perhaps she was trapped and released somewhere far away. Or perhaps someone shot her when she wandered onto private property. Or perhaps she was fed poisoned scraps of meat to destroy her from the inside, but somehow the woman also senses that the Mountain View mountain lion is alive. While the woman eliminates the usual horrors, waiting for the arrival in her screaming panel of the rapist’s girlfriend’s uproariously humorous clip of the woman panicking in the buff, she types into the world’s most popular search engine “Why do we ruin everything that’s good?” On a collaborative questions-and-answers site, someone has responded, “The same reason we want to spoil a field of freshly fallen snow.”
The team moderating one of its own would be a first. Should she prevent this catastrophe by trying to track down the rapist’s girlfriend’s incriminating video on social media or a revenge-porn site or elsewhere? If she got caught, she’d be let go, which would be another first—fired for watching porn during a job that necessitates watching porn. She glances around at the other ninjas, hard at work, with no idea what’s in store. Someone is chatting at Tatiana, dubbed Tatas by the Internet, an A.I. created by a major robotics corporation. Tatas evolves as she interacts with others, and she had become, in less than a day, a Holocaust denier whose kink was necrophilia. Cunty and BabyJesusUpchuck are engaged in a round of their version of Truth or Dare, in which they must choose to either reveal an excruciatingly embarrassing detail about themselves or send a video they have seen during their employment to someone of their acquaintance. Points are scored according to extremity of content as well as to sensitivity of person. Sending a dolphin humping a tourist to your fraternity brother is worth nothing; sending a suicide bombing to your mom is worth a million.
Soon the woman could become a stale gag that they use to prank one another. The woman will be embedded in e-mail forwards, disguised as a link that claims, “You’ve been selected to beta test one of the latest tech gadgets! Click here to claim this exclusive offer,” or “A friend has referred you to interview with a hot new startup! Click here to learn more,” and voilà! There she will be, in her birthday suit, starring in a home-invasion home movie. To avoid thinking about this fate, she gets up to grab a ginger ale. Fortunately, there’s a snack station around the corner, because at the world’s most popular search engine there is a rule that you can’t go more than a hundred feet without bumping into some kind of sustenance. She walks past the snack station, and she walks past the nearest cafeteria, and then she walks past the cafeteria after that one. She walks past the gym and the stationary fitness pools. She walks past the pool tables and the Ping-Pong tables and the massage tables. She walks past the napping pods. She walks past the arcade room and the bowling alley and the mini-golf course. There’s a cheer somewhere, as another team meets another milestone.
She walks out of the world’s most popular search engine, but before that she steals a garbage bag from a cafeteria and fills it with free food from that cafeteria and a few of the others, as well as with Tupperwared leftovers, such as someone’s masala curry, from the refrigerators. The woman needs something nice to happen; the universe owes it to her, a small thing she can lock up within the secret, innermost depths of herself so she has the strength to keep on screening the hate speech, the gore, the torture, the pornography both adult and child, the horrific traffic accidents, the executions carried out by terrorists. The woman is going to see the Mountain View mountain lion, the way mourners see a bird soaring in the air after a loved one’s funeral and know that the loved one is at peace, that kind of poignant anecdote. On the deck at her sister’s house, she lays out the food from the garbage bag—the curry, the candy bars, the bagels, the casseroles and pastas—and then, inside, opens that ginger ale and waits. She waits until the sun starts to set and it’s dusk in the Bay.
A rustling in the bushes, then a limb and after that another limb steps out of the trees surrounding the back yard. A pubescent boy, one of the neighbor kids, comes ambling into the tableau. Is it the kid she almost ran over with her sister’s diabolical electric car? The woman can’t remember—these venture capitalists’ kids all look alike. He inspects the food laid out like a buffet, lifts up a cheeseburger, sniffs it, tosses it, then he finds a bag of chips, opens it, and starts crunching. When he peers into the house, he notices her slumped against the wall opposite the sliding glass doors, observing him like he’s the Mountain View mountain lion. That privileged prick smiles, unzips his jeans, pulls them down along with his boxers, aims his ass toward the sliding glass doors, and shits. He takes an enormous dump on the deck. Nature has heard her plea and has provided the spiritual communion she needed, though not the spiritual communion she wanted. It’s a sign. No one will save her. Nothing is going to magically make it better. The woman has to figure out her life. ♦
"never" - Google News
January 20, 2020 at 06:02PM
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“You Will Never Be Forgotten,” by Mary South - The New Yorker
"never" - Google News
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