Selfie, Suicide Read online

  Something had changed. It was quantifiable. The finale had been so harshly panned that even this formerly adored image had become the subject of ridicule for the commentariat- even those vultures of dead trends, the late-night standup pundits, had made monologue fodder of it. The few early-adopting Symon-contrarians were riding victory laps, waving their banners of “I Told You So” before the crowd of viewers who had decided, finally, that they were not with Symon after all.

  “It was groan-inducing”- is what Cairey’s date had said, with a confidence bolstered by the critical consensus. She pointed at the 33% aggregate rating she’d pulled up on her phone, all- the-while unaware of a verdant distraction crooked by her incisor. “I wish they’d just killed him off like everyone thought they would. That would have wrapped it up nicely. Cliffhanger-endings like this are just like- ugh. Like what, is he setting up for a movie or something? Is he gonna like, run for President? I’m still annoyed at it.” To this Cairey had nodded, nearly grimacing as she swiped that vestigial bit of vegetation with her critical tongue- an image now linked in his mind to the windshield wiper he’d watched on their ride to the museum from brunch.

  It had hypnotized him. His eyes followed its pendulous motion- back-and-forth- as it snagged a rain soaked leaf & waved it in quarter-circle arcs. He had been nearly deaf to her incessant deluge of syllables- about the show, about the buildings they passed, the streets, the cars, the pedestrians, the brands & billboards & songs & snippets of commercials that emanated from the car’s compulsory speakers. To all of it, everything she said, he agreed & nodded rhythmically- down with each returning swipe of the wiper & up with each perpendicular thud.

  & with all of this racing through his mind in scattered form, Cairey finally frees his sleeve from the handle of the door by snapping the loose thread with a violent jerk. He nearly bumps into his date, as she has paused in the entryway without entering, exhaling dramatically in a display of reverence, as if before a great Buddha seen after a lifelong pilgrimage, or before any other mecca of ostensible gravity, imbued with the power to grant life’s meaning, some revelation, or purpose to render all hardships & sufferings of the trail sublime.

  “Don’t you just adore the MEH?” she asks. Cairey doesn’t share her evident enthusiasm, but does his best to make it out like he does- still nodding as one does when one’s mind has wandered off down silent interior corridors.

  There’s no use arguing with assigned dates, he thinks, especially with a reputation as bad as his own from all of his unfortunate unpleasantnesses, his various fuck-ups as he calls them to his therapist. It has been a long time since his last first date, if that had even counted as a date, & it has only been a year since the day of the breakup of the only relationship he’s ever had. That day had been a fuckup so monstrous in proportion that its consequences were carved into his social-credit score, which had dipped into a pit so deep, that he’s only recently proved himself barely-acceptable to the algorithms that governed dating-service registrations. It has only been days since he has been able to put himself on the market again, & he is still in the precarious position of “probational approval”- but he isn’t thinking about any of this in the soft & padded recesses of his soul, in his secret chamber of silent solemnity.

  He’s still thinking about Symon. He’s thinking about how much he absolutely adores its finale, still, despite all of the criticisms he has ingested. He still admires the show-runner’s tricks, his gestures toward & perturbations of this realm beyond the screen. He is amused by each of his spikings of the camera lens. He doesn’t understand how it’s possible for his judgment to so diverge from the critical consensus, though he knows that there’s no use arguing about it, much less defending it on grounds he’s unable to formulate. Perhaps, he thinks, he should have mentioned to her that he’d seen them filming that last scene, on that very worst day of his life actually, & that he could be seen in the overhead crowd shot amongst Symon’s gathered disciples. Perhaps, he thinks, Symon’s rhetorical question meant something much more to him considering he had overheard it unmediated by the show itself, & that this very fact placed him in a privileged position, as, perhaps, a true disciple of Symon’s.

  Perhaps she would have found that case of synchronic serendipity amusing, at least- or, & more likely, she would have only pretended to, all-the-while being amused, instead, by his attempt to show off- as if encountering a film crew on the streets of their city was anything but a daily occurrence- as if being incidentally on camera was some accomplishment- as if he were some bumbling tourist taking note of the skyscrapers- as if he were amazed by the daily procession of the Sun- as if his life’s greatest accomplishment wasn’t this pathetic, insignificant inclusion in the margins of another’s critical failure.

  He still finds it interesting, anyway. He delights in the fact that he hadn’t known at the time that this was the scene he’d seen, nor anything about Symon, as he’d only watched its backlog after running into the crew & becoming enamored by the spectacle. Nor had he known then that he had been included in it. Still, he feels that this alone cannot explain why he likes it, as he did like it, even at the time. He likes it even more now that he’s seen it through the framing of all of its episodes, & the context of the show as an entirety, even more than can be justified by the mere fact of having been a minor appendage in its production. He guesses that he likes the audacity of the whole thing- perhaps, he thinks, out of his misplaced confidence in the power of Art to escape from its frame of artifice & inspire some change in reality? But what has the show- what has Art ever done for him, really, but distract him, momentarily, from the unending tragedies of his life?

  & this question comes to him like a knock on a door. & there, within that internal cell where he has been momentarily safe from destructive analysis, a door is thrown open. His mind’s guests are always knocking only to enter unbidden- knocking only to warn of their inevitable entrances. A parade of uninvited thoughts storm in, arms crossed behind their backs, to remind him in a chorus, in voices tinged with benign scorn, that people like what they like- they dislike what they dislike- & only narcissists like himself have the audacity to suggest that their judgments are wrong. They remind him that these unmoored cretins, such as himself, who insist on the superiority of their taste against the critical consensus are only signaling to some fictitious audience their ultimately grandiloquent sense of superiority in culture, which they believe, delusionally, to be synonymous with some sort of virtue. They remind him that such thinking is merely symptomatic of alienated, insecure, & certifiably insane self-obsessive schizotypals whose egos cannot bear the collective truths of the social construction that we like to call reality.

  They remind him that this motivated reasoning is deployed as a defense mechanism for grandiose delusions. They remind him of a particular truth, which he knows so well that he often subvocalizes it as a mantra & banishing ritual: No one cares, Cairey.

  No one has cared or will ever care for the productions of his diseased mind- all of these thoughts & opinions & vague gestures at ideas that spew into his consciousness like exhaust fumes into the atmosphere. They’re as predictable & pollutive as any consequence of late industrial society. They’re the mutilated chirps of birds diseased by factory runoff. & Cairey, over the last year, has become downright fond of reminding himself such things. He feels the burden of his self-conscious analysis lift from his shoulders. He forces a wry smile, & smiling, he takes a step from his introverted cell, & shuts the real door of the real Museum behind him.

  “Well?” she asks, as she hangs her coat over his shoulder. He is stripping himself of his overcoat, the one he’d bought at a Goodwill, under the duress of his ever-dwindling finances & the grey cosmopolitan snow. This unexpected encumbrance throws off his instinctual rhythm. “Oh’fcourse” he manages, barely avoiding the certain offense of kissing her coat to the floor. I should listen to her, he reminds himself, she’s trying to be amicable with me- despite the fact that I ignored her the whole ride he
re, just to stare at a fucking leaf. I’m uninteresting. My brain is fucked up. I’ve bungled every question she’s asked me. She must think I’m abnormal. Maybe even deranged. She’s probably uncomfortable with me. Fair enough. She’ll savage me in review. I’m fucking up again. & I’ll deserve it. I deserve worse.

  She interrupts his thoughts with an announcement, her eyes scanning the heavens of the vestibule. She says “I haven’t been here in forever” with forever enunciated like the name of a prestigious brand, “When was the last time you were here Cairey?” & it is with this deployment of his proper name that Cairey realizes that he’s forgotten hers & can only remember the name of her avatar- the name which had attracted him & convinced him to accept the date arrangement in the first place, the name he’d only learned, like so many things in his life, to be fraudulent upon further inspection. He wracks his mind, but can only remember “Abigail Wazir,” the name she’d used to shield herself from “creeps & stalkers,” but he remembers nothing more than this.

  “Uh- years I think. It was years ago. A long time ago.”

  Unheedful of his thought’s council, he is once more thrown into his introverted analysis. He completely ignores her follow-up to his answer to her question- which was only asked, really, as a means of gaining approval to once more, go-on & on & on about herself. So as she’s recounting her last Museum excursion, trilling with superlative adjectives & hyperbolic analogies, Cairey drafts a plot to procure her proper name in such a fashion that will not let on that he’s procuring it at all. He’s halted in the sketching phase of this plan.

  A disquieting shadow is cast upon him- a shadow in the shape of a prison-tatted Albert Einstein wearing 80s era bling- two Flavor-Flav clocks hanging from his neck, iced out, & ticking with relativistically significant distinction. The source of this shadow is a recently commissioned statue titled “Everybody is a Genius” after the old nuclear weisenheimer’s famously misattributed quotation. This is also the title of the Museum’s current bifurcated exposition- which bears the subtitles “In Life” & “In Death.” The statue had been designed by an acquaintance of Cairey’s from his youniversity days- but he knows none of these things. What has halted Cairey in his plotting in the entryway is the advertised prices for entrance on the signboard they’re approaching.

  He had not considered this. He’d maintained, so far, his assumption that the Museum was free- for-all, or at least, free for residents of the city. It had been free for him when he’d last endured it on assignment as an undergrad at the General Arts Youniversity, back when he was a freshman & still majoring in Socio-Hegemonical Interrogation & Theory. The Youniversity no longer exists. It went bankrupt two years prior, though the debts he owes it are not so kind.

  The price-list triggers Cairey’s ever-present economic anxieties into the full-blown panic of a budget crisis. He weighs the sum he’s already expended on their split brunch & is suffocating in worrisome figures- unable to check his dwindling checking account, he wonders if he’ll be able to clear it on credit. The specter of an overcharge fee lingers, & he fears surpassing his bank- regimented monthly spending budget- a standard policy for someone with a social-credit score as low as his- & this fear haunts him with a surly grin- which in his mind becomes the dessert cocktail his date had ordered, which was equal in price to his entree-&-endless-mimosa combo.

  It glares at him in his mind’s eye, with its mochi-spheres impaled on chocolate straws, diagonally askew, granting an air of cockeyed bemusement to its taunting pareidolic face. She hadn’t even offered him a sip of it- never mind a chocolate straw, which he ough’t’ve been allotted at least a portion of. It would have been the right thing to do. He had paid for half of it after all. He chokes the collar of her coat as a pittance of revenge- an act governed by a sort of sympathetic magical logic typical of his habitual acts of impotent impudence. He really wanted a goddamn sip, at the very least- though, he reminds himself, he had never asked for one.

  & he certainly hadn’t asked to return to the Museum of Expressive Humanism, nevermind pay for the privilege. That was entirely her fault. Or perhaps, he thinks, it was partially the dating service’s fault. He hadn’t asked her if she’d planned the date herself or if she’d picked a precurated plan. Experience advised him that such an inquiry implied a negative judgment with respect to her creativity, spontaneity, agency, etc. All he had done was advertise himself as free for Sunday, & had been informed on Friday that a date could be arranged with an “Abigail Wazir” if he agreed. The details of the arrangement were not supplied then. He’d known neither the itinerary nor the avatar of his date when he had accepted the invitation. He had only seen the name “Abigail Wazir,” & suicidally drunk & stoned as he was, & as lonely & miserable as ever he was, he’d sighed a regretful “fuck it” & swiped right solely for his affection for the name Abigail. As soon as the details were divulged on the confirmation page- he realized what a mistake he had made. A cancellation would have sent him below the acceptability threshold again. & he’d wanted to cancel. Oh, how he’d wanted to cancel. He had come up with a litany of excuses to cancel, but he was too afraid to use them. He decided, instead, to let the date serve as at test for himself. If it went poorly, it would confirm his complete uselessness & if it went well... well, he didn’t suspect that it would.

  So he looks at her beside him as they reach the ticket booth, hoping she can understand the turmoil in his heart by means of telepathy- & maybe return him some semblance of a sign, a glint of an eye, a flash of a smile, even a freckle of recognition- anything that might recompense his sacrifices & assure him of something good to come in life- but all he finds, so close to her now, is a constellation of zits hiding behind a plaster of cover-up & pale foundation, from which connect-the-dot shapes emerge like from the stucco ceilings of his insomnia. A formation emerges distinctly, running from above her right eye & all the way down...

  He looks at his feet. He sighs. It’s beyond too late. It’s far beyond too late. There will be no escape. He cannot flee on any imaginable account. Not yet. His boots are cemented to his fate.

  “Sir?” asks the man behind the ticketbooth as Cairey raptly investigates the knots in his laces.

  Maybe... he thinks, impishly.

  “One adult-” he says, but is interrupted by her elbow to his ribs & the pinprick of her disgusted eyes. Her glare stabs into his temple like the tip of a falling icicle.

  “One moment please, sorry” he says, perhaps too softly for the ticket man to hear.

  “I was under the impression that we were splitting” he whispers “we split the brunch & I thought- ”

  “We didn’t split the ride here. I paid for that. Remember?” she says, her voice raising indignantly for the first time, breaking the whisper-pact of public propriety Cairey had presumed he needn’t make- “We had a deal, remember? You agreed on our way here. I didn’t mean to raise my voice. I’m sorry, but don’t you remember? We went over this.”

  Cairey knows for an absolute & undeniable fact that he had not uttered a single meaningful or legally-binding syllable in the car, unless “Oh wows” & “that’s wilds” were evidences of intent. It’s not worth it, he thinks. So he hushes & apologizes with an “alright alright I forgot I got it sorry”- & lets her do the talking. He passes his credit card to the ticket man & prays that that the transaction goes through. It does, & he’s handed his receipt after their entrance bracelets are wrapped around their wrists.

  The total was 20% more than he’d already expended on brunch. Today, in total, he has expended an amount that could cover his groceries for a month. His brain throbs, drunk & numb on submerged antipathy- a feeling somewhere between an icepick lobotomy & an icecream headache. He should have said no, he thinks, as he knows from research as extensive as it is embarrassing that girls receive quite frequently- more frequently than the most cynical men even imagine- that girls quite frequently receive vouchers from ridesharing services allied with various dating platforms as an incentive to schedule using their part
icular service. They are included in all prefabricated arrangements- & this brunch-museum date is one of the most popular precurated plans. In fact, Cairey has read quite a bit about this, more than can be healthy for his mind. He has read the forums where girls congregate to test various strategies aimed at maximizing their dating ROI- & these things are as obsessively charted & calculated as the strategies of the most dedicated of coupon clipping mothers. He’s spent more time investigating such things than he cares to admit to himself- & all that he’s gleaned from his investigations is an increasingly malevolent suspicion for this supposedly better half of his miserable species.

  If only that’s all he had- his financial woes- the pains of knowing how defenseless he is to getting snaked & sharked & fucked by bankers, financiers, merchants of goods & experiences. He is used to these. But oh- what is worse than his financial immiseration is that somewhere beneath his dejection & disaffection a part of him still “believes in Love.” & if it wasn’t for this remnant of innocence, he could have avoided this dating racket entirely. He loathed this industry of Love with all of its catechisms, its veiled mysteries & rites, now fed into the black box of artificially intelligent management, where Cupid is now computed. & what could Love mean if it meant to fall for the dictates of an unanswerable algorithm, after penances paid- the chic fusion brunch in a gentrifying neighborhood, the enculturating museum excursion- these demonstrations of compatible social capitals- perhaps, even, an obligatory gift-shop trinket, & more drinks at some skyline bar... all of these microtransactions slicing like lingchi razors, bleeding dollars & decimals in steady faucet drips from a body barely capable of motivating itself to survive... Was this the end of this Love Business?