Rejection: Fiction

by Tony Tulathimutte

So he resorts to online dating, cropping out his narrow shoulders from his photos and carefully wording his bio: He/him/his (or whatever pronouns you are most comfortable with). Unshakably serious about consent. Abortion’s #1 fan. Loves books, Thai food, a glass of vinho verde on my balcony, endless conversation . . . and did I mention books? 5535756843 I can usually be found haunting the bookstores and bakeshops of our fair burgh, when I’m not dismantling the imperialist male supremacist hetero patriarchy. But I’d also be fine saying “To hell with it!” and staying at home for an Agnes Varda marathon sesh followed by discussion . . . and perhaps a wee snogfest? 5535756841 I *always* do my own cooking (thanks Mom!) so I’ll make a killer brunch for you! Trans women are women, duh. All races, ethnicities, and body types—but NOT all ages—very welcome!

She shows up forty minutes late, which he forgivingly tolerates, knowing that women’s time is taxed by the pressures of female grooming.

After this incident, he develops thoughts of self-harm, which are sharpened by his awareness that rejection, loneliness, and sexual frustration are nothing compared with institutional and historical oppression. His sadness, he knows, is a symptom of his entitlement, so he is not even entitled to his sadness.

They’ve all stopped inviting him to dinner parties because It was a couples thing and you would’ve hated it, which, while true, was still exclusionary, backed by the hegemonic and regressive institution of monogamy.

Fantastic. That’s fucking great. The clearest example yet of how even his friends dismiss him with straw-man arguments out of sheer intellectual laziness. Because he refuses the easy consolation of playing along with the oppressive patriarchal paradigm, they’d rather call him self-sabotaging, instead of thinking critically for one second about the bullshit social biases narrow-shouldered men suffer under, which originate in the same toxic masculinity they supposedly abhor.

When he manages to ejaculate it falls out of him like a touchless soap dispenser. So he’s finally managed to sexually bore even himself.

This place never used to be crowded, it had been a quiet place to read without feeling lonely; now it is massed with couples and their offspring colonizing yet another space, basking in the triumphalism of love, instead of confronting the real harm of their prejudice and superiority and, yes, the privileges they enjoy.

no more wasting time on mid brunets just bc they sling dick Edwina Call that a sunk cock fallacy ❗ Anjali

Plummeting into bed that night, now she feels like a martini without its glass, a sloppy puddle of poison. The next morning she’s so hungover she has to sit on the bathtub rim while she’s brushing her teeth. Her morning dump is like a multistage rocket launch, so loud and fervid and aerosol that to psychically recover afterward she takes a fifteen-minute shower and buys some white linen sheets online.

fish selfies, selfies cropped to conceal baldness. Plus, the relationships are so brief they seldom overlap, meaning she’s not technically even poly, just hopscotching mile after mile of the dreariest dick imaginable; the ceaseless kayfabe of bad sex with divorced dads and DJs. The sociopathic nudniks, who either wind up jealous and clingy, or never ask her questions about herself. The otherwise handsome men over fifty whose DMs are like,

of nutprints to the bathroom. She starts keeping track of her failures in her notes app, an index of icks: —smelled like a baby —said “technically” too much —said “mmm” whenever he took a bite of food —kept shazaming the music —hiccupped the whole time I was going down on him —kept his Invisalign trays in while going down on me —said “cromulent” —drizzled pineapple vape juice directly onto his tongue —shamed me for never having read Deleuze, later insisted condoms “hurt” —eats stuffing every week not just Thanksgiving Eventually, realizing that she does not actually want to remember these things, she switches to keeping track of her dates using the contact names on her phone. Mr. Sneezy. Mr. Gifs. Mesh Shorts. eSports Guy. Beach Towel. Angry Vegan Doctor. Ugly Dog.

Unlike most guys, he does ask her questions about herself, albeit terminally dull ones of the sort you’d ask to calibrate a polygraph test—what do you do, where have you lived, what’ve you been reading lately.

So that she never forgets this pain, she takes some pics of herself crying, looking as sick and inflamed as possible so her future self would never be able to betray her by denying she was once this wretched. That is, assuming things would improve ever again. My life’s been stuffed into this tiny suffocating margin, she thinks. If something is going to knock her so far off-course, it should at least be entertaining or make her seem worldly, like a drug addiction or a stalker.

Though she has vague intentions of someday getting healthy, like when she went pescatarian a few years back, for lunch she eats the same soggy gyro at the halal cart outside her office instead of going to the chopped-salad place two blocks farther, and for dinner she stuffs a cold flour tortilla with turkey slices and shredded mozzarella and a squirt of mayo, each ingredient the same color as her, rolled up into a hateful dildo she crams in her mouth, barely chewing. No matter her mood, drinking always seems justified: either she’s hopeless so who cares, or it’ll help her sleep so she can theoretically jog the next day. Which she never does, because of the hangover—anyway even thinking about exercise makes her angry, the idea of willfully suffering to reclaim her looks against the time and effort she’s wasted on this loser, or no, on the idea of this loser, and on an emotion nowhere near as nourishing as love.

So she quits podcasts too, leaving her nothing to do but stream all nine seasons of the American version of The Office, then all nine seasons again, and again, that fucking melodica theme song playing from her laptop’s trebly speakers over and over until her mind feels bleached by screenlight. She brings the American version of The Office into the bathroom with her so she doesn’t have to be alone there, and can’t fall asleep without it playing at quarter-volume beside her, sipping off her weed pen and dully prodding herself with her vibrator while watching this prechewed slop, so pandering and room-temperature, so American, this homeopathic dose of comedy that yet manages to perfectly silence some companionship-starved lobe in her brain until she nods off and wakes to her vibrator and laptop both dead.

You It’s all “Ew, boys” right up until the moment you get your boat neck wedding dress and your bonded pair of labradoodles. And start posting fucking Facebook letterboard memes for your parents where you complain about hubby’s snoring and property taxes. Or whatever the fuck. Nobody here actually has real problems. 5535756900 This is just a daisy chain of empty compliments. A validation cartel. Or worse, because y’all also get to consume other people’s suffering and feel, all at once, superior, gracious, and caring for it. Edwina “y’all” You are

Sarah ok Alison like we get it u punctuate texts bc u don’t want to risk looking stupid even though it makes you sound amish ur that bitch who wears a cami under a v-neck because ur too scared to be even a normal amount of slutty the way u use highlighter makes u look like u xanned out in a tanning booth

She realizes that she’s been realizing this for a while.

So instead Kant’s dissatisfaction transfers over to ordinary annoyances, like how Julian nags at him for patronizing companies on the BDS list, but will happily use his rich friends’ SodaStreams and eat their Sabra hummus, laundering his consumption. All the little projects he always says he’s working on but never finishes, not just the cheese cave but his Studio Ghibli–themed novelty tarot deck; his graphic novel about the 2008 subprime crisis; three kittens adopted and rehomed. Or how Julian can absolutely never use the word racist to describe any offensive thing his white friends ever do, only kinda weird, unfortunate, messy, chaotic, or if it’s truly indefensible, like when Noah posts a photo shoot of himself in geisha drag with a sequined Chinese-takeout-box-shaped purse, not great.

Here finally Kant perceives the true rift between them: Julian doesn’t know the difference between embarrassment and shame. How shame soaks, stains, leaves a skidmark on everything and, when it has nothing to stick to, spreads until it does. Embarrassment is contained by incidents, gets funny and small over time; shame runs gangrene through the entire past, makes the future impossible. You can’t own it or laugh it off, only try to bail it out in sloshing bucketfuls, drenching yourself in the process. Embarrassment is an event, shame a condition, one that Julian has somehow either mastered or never experienced, which explains why he’s so easygoing, and why, to him, the world is so tractable, why all seems fixable with talk.

Act III (mins. 15–18): “Huge Loads Emerged from My Yellow Wood”

Her third claim was the wildest: she said I was only pursuing *my* goals, not *ours*! As a Stoic, I seldom get pressed, but I wasn’t gonna let that one slide, so I clapped back and said, Oh so I’m the jerk, me! Sure, yep, that’s right, I’m soooooo terrible for giving you a free place to live, free nutrition, free affection, free mindset coaching, I’m the big bad bumbaclaat, everything I do and say is SO awful and I’ve NEVER done anything good for you and you’ve NEVER been wrong in your whole life, I’m to blame for you sitting around on your bussy all day doing hey-nonny-nonny, that’s right, gosh, what an opp I am, and so on. (I was using my spreading skills from debate, so imagine me saying all this at about ~300 WPM.)

These are my goals, I said: the instant I hit retirement at age 40, I want to start having kids, just like you do—as many at a time as IVF will safely allow, until we hit a dozen. (Four per gestation cycle would strike the ideal balance between fast and feasible.) I want us all to live under the same roof, in a big “mothership” that takes care of our every need. Alison would be the household COO, running admin and housework, which she obviously enjoys, and I’d be CEO, overseeing our kids’ education from birth. We’ll wake up at 5 a.m., chug our shakes, engage in physical and mental enrichment, and get our yeeks in bed at the stroke of eight. As soon as the kids acquire language, we’ll start them on an *actually useful* curriculum focused on bizdev and Stoic thought that will give them a massive edge on public-schoolers—picture everyone happily sweating away at their custom desks/treadmills as they absorb meticulously curated high-quality podcasts at 2.5x speed.

I offered to sell him my gender, implying it would allow him to do whatever girls did, even enter girls’ bathrooms, and he went for it. I wrote my name on a folded sheet of ruled notebook filler, and he gave me $22 in a wad of ones and change, which by the conversion rate of childhood made me a millionaire. In this way, before I learned gender was fluid, I’d learned it was liquid.

So by the time I hit high school myself I’d abjured striverism, and had devised a strategy to avoid his fate.

(I’m one of those people with severe neoteny but the soul of a thousand-year-old tree.)

I’d made a special request through Student Housing to live in the queer-friendly vegetarian-friendly 420-friendly co-op, and the people there were . . . friendly. One of those houses where you just know everyone is walking around with the most devil-may-care pubes.

Everyone’s backs straightened, somehow even in the papasans.

This is one reason I’ve never been considered a credible witness to my own life. I go to extremes because I assume, usually correctly, that nobody will pay attention otherwise, but then I’m regarded as hysterical or pretentious, or else I’m being disingenuous, or contrarian, or I’m playing a card, or going for cheap shock—You don’t really mean that, do you? The more people try to eyeroll me into rectitude the more I always go the other way.

In high school I could flatter myself by chalking my unpopularity up to 1.) goth, 2.) zits, and 3.) gay nerd brother; now the imperative of defiance became an insistence on friendlessness. I was back on the carousel of I-hate-people-because-they-hate-me-because-I-hate-people ad nihilum.

“And if you have any feedback for me, I’m all ears.” My feedback is maybe don’t make it my job to provide feedback, I said. “Oh jeez, right on. Man, I’m so sorry, you’re right. You know what, Bee? You’re really smart.” The worst feeling in the world is winning the patronizing approval of someone so, so stupid.

I’d been acting nonchalant, but I was, to be real, torridly chalant. He didn’t really want feedback, he was doing the lib thing of acting like he wanted to be morally dommed, to supply an occasion to feel veils lift and scales fall, pretending to cede authority to me as I vented, all while demonstrating that he was lowkey more antiracist and feminist than me by dint of his forthrightness and intellect and patience and eagerness to learn and willingness to reach out. So I let him have it, more or less what you just read.

Place of residence has never meant much to me, wherever I am I just flutter toward the Wi-Fi like some nerdass moth. My real life has always been online, which I say without pride or shame; it’s when I moved back home that it became my only life.

You might assume I’m the kind of loser who only has online friends—wrong! I have no friends. Which is why I loved Twitter: an open, rhizomatic forum where you could aggravate existing mental illnesses, shop for new ones, violate your Miranda rights, and get fired. A place to be judged on the character of your content, driven by rubbernecking and spite, where fame is a millstone and names are bad op-sec. Twitter was the right word for it, birdsong being a Darwinian squall mistaken for idle chatter, screaming for territory and mates. An improv class, press conference, intervention, Klan rally, comics convention, and struggle session all booked in the same conference room. A crowded elevator where anyone who smelled a fart also had to fart. Each post was an arrow fired blind into the sky, and if it hit something, ten thousand arrows shrieked back down and called you a cunt.

(Online people are always accusing each other of narcissism and borderline, when the obvious house disorder is histrionic.)

And it’s almost endearing how people are so transparently their child selves online, how irrespective of content or sophistication the subtext is always Look at me and How dare you, and the sub-subtexts Who am I and Save me.

Sharing your diseased inner life is so common and incentivized that any information not willingly volunteered seems deliberately suppressed.