Private Citizens

by Tony Tulathimutte

Linda picked at the white fray of her cutoffs. Already she missed New York—the city all others merely quoted, that tremendous vile heart pumping bedlam through its boroughs, whereas San Francisco was more uterine: passive, nonvital. Here the raindrops were smaller, the hustle slower, everything tolerated. And cities that tolerated everything tolerated mediocrity.

Afternoons she’d spent swatting cigarette ash off books, and at night she’d gone to parties, where her Stanford Domme shtick gave her cred for a checkered past she didn’t have: what was really checkered was her future. Her tattoo sleeves had vined out and joined between her shoulder blades, her hair went whitely afloat with bleaching, her voice turned permanently hoarse. Two years of bars and shows, dancing and reading. A bright catwalk of youth.

With begrudging pledges from each of her separated parents, she’d checked into a recovery center on some forested acreage in Santa Cruz. The idea at first was to see how many people she could alienate as quickly as possible—during the icebreaker, when she was asked to name her favorite book and describe her worst date, she’d said, I guess my worst date was the time I was raped. Oh, and my favorite book is Moby-Dick. But when she realized that rehab counselors saw this sort of snide pushback all the time, she decided not to resist, but to cooperate.

Seeing her college friends after two years made her sad. It was clear now that they’d all avoided experiences, capitulated on their desires, afraid of disturbing their little routines.

Of course, eventually party had to deflate from verb to noun, but there was no renouncing indulgences you hadn’t exhausted.

People seemed to like him when he drank, so he drank.

Taren had grown up on the fifth floor of a public housing development in Denver, living out the usual hardscrabble urban latchkey narrative, with crucial mentors and social awakenings; at Berkeley he did coke and studied public pedagogy and community organizing theory, graduating in journalism at the exact moment that O. J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky cratered his faith in news. His girlfriend, a development economics grad student, was abruptly deidealized by an unplanned pregnancy, and Taren married her in the same civic building where she would pauperize him six years later. He waited tables until his daughter was in preschool, then got hired at the Ad Council, where he coordinated billboards telling black people to get checked for lupus, gay men to quit meth and get tested, Chinese people to seek mental illness assistance, Latinos to curb their kids’ TV watching, everyone to exercise. “I was the white colonialist coming down from the mountaintop to hang fifty-foot commandments for minorities. I might as well’ve been wearing a pith helmet and jodhpurs.”

Cory hated being vegetarian. She loved meat but was also mad at it, having acquired the taste in childhood innocence. The lip-glazing completeness of a cheeseburger, bacon’s salty crunch. She loved meat and hated kale and yoga and hated women who fetishized kale and yoga, capitulations to the male gaze marketed as fitness. The only problem with eating meat was that it was evil for every conceivable reason. Cory did more than abstain; she resisted.

It was one of Barr’s great joys to see suckers getting screwed, and if you weren’t contributing to the production order, you were getting screwed. He was the kind of hypocrite who dismissed novels because they were “made up,” even though he still watched movies. He liked to stare into the windows of gyms and laugh, because he disdained both fat people and unpaid exertion.

It was his fault that Cory spontaneously generated puns and anagrams and portmanteaus and spoonerisms and mondegreens. It had started twelve years ago, at a Burmese restaurant in the Richmond; when Deedee offered Cory the rest of her platha bread, Cory said, I couldn’t plathably, and Barr had laughed so hard that Cory kept doing it to please him—Indian food had her naanplussed, the plural of lox was loxen, the superlative of toilet was toilest, Jane Doe was married to John Deere.

Hard work redeems mediocre intelligences, as Seneca says.”

Will was interested in Vanya’s career. But his brain wasn’t—at least the part that needed to surpass a threshold of ego-relevance before it converted words into meaning.

VANYA HAD BEEN gone two weeks and Will sat by his open bay window, drinking Fernet and smoking. A muscular blackfly made steely timpani noises against the screen. The barometry of Noe Valley made the clouds sit just above the roofs, cantaloupe-colored with perishing sunlight.

He realized he didn’t have a hangover: he was a hangover. As he crawled out and took to his knees, a pincer gripped his temples. He felt like he’d swallowed an unmeltable icicle. His first steps toward the bathroom triggered a mass displacement of fluids: salty gunge from sinus to throat, acid vomit from stomach to mouth, obligingly reswallowed. A reek of moldy collard greens emanated from behind his tongue, which felt like a strip of ass-wiped biltong. If for some insane reason he ever wanted to feel this way again, he would give himself a concussion and eat a live cat.

As they walked, Eve recounted how she’d gotten preggers literally the day she and Jared started classes at CCA, right when they’d secured their student loans and settled into their apartment. After two months of failed classes, homicidal arguments, and depressing web searches, they dropped out and did the damn parent thing. Nix substances, add omega-threes. Eight hours of easy labor in a natural birth pool, then sixteen hours of hard labor every day after that: Eve waited tables, Jared barbacked and waited tables. They didn’t have friends, art, or lives. They had a baby.

She showed “promise”? She’d shown promise years ago. This from some old white dickshaker who thought there was such a thing as overthinking.

La dolce vita it was fucking not. It was especially depressing to see a woman like Eve fall to the sanctioned Stockholm syndrome of motherhood, babbling in falsetto, obsessing over BPA-free binkies and poly-blend Björns—and constantly filming Mercy sleeping, oozing, sucking on Duplo blocks, hours of baby B-roll as the chubby enigma hazed itself into subjectivity.

Greatness was a moated metropolis you were born into or not. Linda occupied its exurbs; she was bridge-and-tunnel to genius, faux poet, proseur. Maybe she could translate. Edit. Copyedit. Serve superior souls. Art was so useless that effort meant nothing without overwhelming success. Process was the booby prize.

Since there was no way he could just clean, he would have to redefine clean. Try a syllogism: cleanliness was next to godliness and God didn’t exist, so cleanliness was next to nothing, so he didn’t have to do anything.

All this disqualified him as a good person and a feminist, but he wasn’t antifeminist either, more of a solipsist—and if solipsism was theory, then masturbation was practice.

Will checked the time. It was now, as usual.

like most Californians, she considered punctuality anal and passive-aggressive,

Her hair Venned interestingly between morning neglect and political statement,

If you preferred the indoors, everyone assumed you were scared of life or emotionally stunted. That wasn’t it. It was just ugly outdoors. Sidewalks with their stubble-beards of filth; scabby trees pregnant with vermin, weeping sap, stewing in dog piss. Sure, it was nice to have some fresh air while he smoked. But he was myopic, hard of hearing, congested—reality was lo-fi, slow and obstructing, too cold or too bright, filled with scrapes, sirens, hidden charges, long distances, pollen, and assholes.

One associate asked whether Cory was eating her feelings. No, she was getting drunk on her feelings, and by the end of the fourth day, the trembling cups of pride-frustration-shame-pity she’d guzzled had made her black out with confessional intimacy.

Nobody spoke. How had Taren managed them? With the built-in boundaries of age and maleness, probably.

When you accepted a hollow compliment you validated a misperception.

I skipped lunch and I’m all low-blood-sugary.” Henrik never could ignore a complaint, always suspected they were accusations.

They embraced over Cory’s lumpy canvas bag. “’Sup hoodrat! What’s with the indoor sunglasses,” Linda panted. Cory took her sunglasses off, and her face gave its eloquent account. Hammocks of violet flesh hanging under her eyes and a cheek zit requiring clinical drainage. “Work’s fucking me up,” she said.

“You said this is opium?” Retrieving the pipe from Linda, the guy took a luxurious hit and said through a bush of smoke, “Actually it’s heroin. Actually it’s better than heroin. It’s death. But some people get all faggy when they hear the H-word. It’s all opiates.” Her hands and cheeks warmed, matched by a queasy remorse that she was accustomed to pushing through. The thing she was indignant about was sapping her indignation.

She twisted the filter off an American Spirit, lit it, and crossed her eyes to stare at its gray-orange cherry. Cigarettes made ideal partners: they made you look good, let you be needy for five minutes before replacing them with another. Stimulation, orality, the breathplay of carbon monoxide. An unlit cigarette smelled like a raisin, a lit one like a cigarette, your fingers afterward like soy sauce. And yes, the romance of smoking was pure product placement, but it was still the sexiest way of hating yourself.

“You make yourself unapproachable. So you provoke, because if you’re awful and people still put up with it, then you must be special, and you justify being shitty by pretending you’re being even harder on yourself.

How shitty of Baptist to ambush her while she was fucked up. And how shitty of San Francisco for being too small to churn away consequence. There was no getting lost.

She closed her eyes, and an unwanted insight lit up before her: PARTIES AREN’T FUN. That you could have fun at a party only confused matters. Alcohol, drugs. Bad dancing to bad music with the wrong number of people. Crowded hallways. Photos. Groping on a bed of coats. Something spills or breaks, someone pukes. A fight. You might meet someone new and interesting, but broadly speaking people were less new and interesting every day.

This was Linda drained of Lindahood, less a person than a sentient body, no realer than words on a document, struck from subject into object—that is, things that felt terrible felt like her. Possibly this new pain would be her great achievement, possessing all the qualities she’d wanted for her writing: a pioneering agony that both straddled genres (thriller, mystery, horror) and defied them, baroque and maximalist, enveloping her with its belabored detail and longeurs, high modernist in its stern insistence on a total universe, its difficulty.

He added that, considering her injuries, she really ought to be dead. He was right. She was tragically prehumous; since she was a reader, most people she cared about were dead or fictional. In Valéry, Phaedrus complained that he couldn’t hear or see in the underworld, and Socrates replied, Perhaps you are not sufficiently dead. Always it was the freckle of vulgar life, bringing pain, seeming to persist no matter what, that denied her the immortality of death.

Time was losing its orderly candor, time was now officially weak—fitting that she should live out her bad writing. In her exhausted half-waking, Linda reviewed the canon of the car-struck: Camus, Sebald, Barthes, Italo Svevo, okay. Frank O’Hara and Randall Jarrell. Nathanael West, T-boned on his way to Fitzgerald’s funeral, ha. Margaret Mitchell, Stephen King—so there was money in it yet.

From deep behind her sunglasses, Linda Troland sees him too, and knows he’s lurking precisely to be seen. Courtship as sit-in protest. At first she’s just like, well hello, who’s this stuttering pork tenderloin? Relaxed-fit jeans, dangling canvas belt, Brewers ball cap, Patagonia microfleece, carabiner keychain. Just like his coffee: a tall plain drip.

“Well.” Seeing him muster his words is like watching a hydroelectric power plant. “First you have the sociopathic bros who see life as a nonstop pussy safari and devise entire social conventions around exploiting female fears. The Apex Creep—alpha-male and pickup-artist types. Just relentlessly catcalling and macking. Polishing an exoskeleton of confidence. They’re usually considered idiots but actually they’re as rational as mosquitoes. They play the numbers. Emotions are just levers on bipedal sex kiosks. Existence is reduced to sham evolutionary behavioralism. They muffle their consciences by insisting that women play the same game—gold diggers or skanks who want to be dominated, and any who deny it are ugly fat dyke feminists.

“I’m sure there are men out there who do treat women fairly, but I assume some enabling x factor of privilege, like it only works because they’re rich or good-looking, or worse, because they don’t think about this stuff. Men can be feminists, but I don’t know if straight guys can avoid being creeps, not here and now. The structural power advantage is always there, even if it’s not leveraged.

If you didn’t hate yourself a lot you wouldn’t like yourself at all.”

It’s not that I have a way with words; it’s that I have no way without them.

Through years of personal optimization testing and strength-finding, she reckoned herself a Type A Left-Brain ESTP Post-Wave Feminist True-Cost Social Capitalist Progressive Independent Compatibilist Challenger Mahayana Buddhist Straight Mono Switch Femme; a Carrie, an Aries, and a Ravenclaw. Last year she’d had her DNA sequenced and found she was part Polish. In this galaxy of metrics Vanya had rigorously defined herself. You’re more than that, Will wanted to say; but could he insist she was more complex than she said she was?

“Yeah, and I’m an atheist. The universe is a random-number generator.” “You’re just saying that because it’s trendy. Atheism is actually really extreme,” Vanya said. “You literally believe there’s no possible undiscovered thing that explains consciousness? You’re positive?” “Nobody’s positive.” “That’s agnostic then. Doubt means agnostic.” “At least put igtheist.” “There’s no menu option for that. Agnostic it is.

“You’re actually right,” Vanya said. “Horoscopes get you thinking.” Vanya went quiet as she worked toward inbox zero, leaving Will to quietly process the everyday aggressions of the word actually.

“Will says you’re into reading, yeah? We might need a Books editor. You could do video reviews.” Will was worried that Vanya was going to go into her spiel about how dead-tree was obsolete and how the five-paragraph essay would give way to the three-minute video clip and how books were paywalls, and Linda would combust.

She paused often to fight low blood sugar, and in lengthening blinks she dreamed of an afterlife in which the turfy fire blanket on her head was brushed out into a blade of satin and she had a big scary wardrobe and hit Pilates every day until she’d burned off the paradoxical melancholy of feeling worthless and underappreciated, of doing work that was frivolous and insurmountable.

They can’t stop talking, hours of recirculating bullshit. Why the left-hand horse on the Marlboro logo wears a crown, and whether whales menstruate. Fuck Bush, marry Rumsfeld, kill Cheney, become Rove.

He reckons that relationships are about maxing out intimacy ASAP, eliminating secrets. No, he doesn’t tell her about the bipolar or the suicide attempt / transfer, but he’s medicated now, and anyway, he’d rather get to know her. He googles her name, chows down her book recommendations, listens to her music. Charts her PMS to the day. He knows she prefers Cabernet, Pantene, Aleve, Trident, Xiu Xiu, and that whenever she can’t find her hair clip it’s always attached to her purse strap. He develops a ratlike intuition about her frequent puking—when, how much, whether migraine- or alcohol-induced, that look of concern on her face when it’s coming.

I’d even worked myself into that delusion where sex = maturity = agency, when really it’s just capitulating to stupid men’s wants.