“It’s cumulative. If you don’t take both now, you’ll feel it by morning.”
He wants to argue. But he also doesn’t want to wake to acute pain. He feels like a child, staring up into his mother’s face, but—no, that’s unfair. His mother was beautiful. His mother loved him. Aileen performs a mother’s duties, a spouse’s duties, but for pay. Three ex-wives and no children. Is that natural? Has he unwittingly subverted a system in which he would have received affectionate care for free? Everything is contracted out now and the world is poorer for it.
“I’ll take two pills,” he says, “and call you in the morning.”
A small joke, but all jokes are too small to receive any acknowledgment from stolid Aileen.
*
BY MORNING, it seems ridiculous that the power was ever out; the storm was truly a case of sound and fury, all wind, almost no snow, at least not on the ground. Gerry enjoys watching the local weathermen and -women try to make it seem more than it was, storytellers aware that they have overpromised and underdelivered. They move their hands over what he knows to be blank screens; Gerry has done his share of local television talk shows, especially in Baltimore. Favorite son and all that. He knows—knew, he hasn’t done local television for years, hasn’t had to—the drabness of the studios, the indignity of sitting in some corner on a Saturday morning, hoping the regular adopt-a-stray segment didn’t run over, stealing the five minutes he had to try to explain his latest novel to a cheerful woman who wasn’t even chagrined not to have read it ahead of time.
This was all before the expansion of the idea of content, but that’s what he was in those situations, content. A static, wallpaper kind of content, determined to be inoffensive at all costs. Local television shows traded in the known. The stories changed, but the format never did. Crime story, traffic story, and now something to make you feel better about human nature. Weather. Sports scores. Local news was like a familiar hymn playing in the background, intended to soothe and pacify.
But national news now—wowza. It’s become an insane, coked-up party girl (or boy) who simply will not leave your apartment, yakking and yakking and yakking, moving from one topic to another without transition. Last year, the New York Times received a lot of criticism for an article about a man who had chosen to live without news. The ultimate in white privilege! Talk about a bubble!
Gerry, whose news “diet” used to consist primarily of the Times, on paper, and the New York Review of Books, thinks people were simply envious of the man. They did not realize it was in their power to turn down the volume, literally and figuratively.
Which is not to say that Gerry has no interaction with social media at all. There is a Twitter account, verified, run by Victoria, which sends out one or two items a week, almost always links to favorite but obscure poems, short stories, sometimes articles about the neglected writers of other countries. His avatar (ugh, stupid word, corrupted word, but at least it hasn’t been as wronged as icon) is a circular snapshot of his own shelves, taken at such close range that it appears to be a beautiful abstract painting, all those lovely worn spines, muted jewels. (The paper covers are stored because they’re dust catchers.)
It is also Victoria’s job to maintain a Google alert on Gerry—and to keep him wholly ignorant of it. Piracy issues are to be directed to Thiru, anything that smacks of libel goes straight to his lawyer, etc., etc. Oh, there was a time when Gerry Googled himself, checked his Amazon ratings, but that was in the early days of the Internet, which happened to be around the time his third book was published. He was young—well, youngish—and there was enormous novelty in obtaining any sort of data about one’s books.
Then one morning, as he typed his latest title into Amazon’s search box, he found himself quivering, there was no other word for it, and he recognized the feeling, even though it was not his: he was like a gambler in the moment before the roulette wheel came to rest. Gerry had never gambled in his life, not in any meaningful way, but his friend Luke had a chronic gambling problem and had described the emotions vividly.
So when Gerry felt that rush, he recognized it for what it was, and knew to avoid it at all costs. Long before other people began using programs to block their Internet access, he had set up his work life so he would not be disturbed. He doesn’t know the password to the apartment’s wireless service, so he didn’t use it on his laptop until his accident. He can get email on his phone, theoretically, but he almost never does, not real ones. Again, Victoria culls it every day and handles the account through his website, a website so basic that it was kind of a punch line, or had been for a day or two last month. “You’re trending,” Victoria had said. “That is, #GeraldAndersensWebsite is trending. Some big literary blogger went viral when she made fun of it.”
“Speak English,” Gerry said, and he wasn’t joking.
So today, when Victoria appears with her sheaves of paper and phone, ready to talk business and errands, he is not initially alarmed when she says: “Um, before we talk about anything, I guess I have to tell you there’s something on Twitter.”
“There’s always something on Twitter,” he says, meaning to be jovial, but she winces as if he’s been cruel. “Something about me?”
“Not directly. Someone tweeting at you.”
“You know how to handle it. Queries about work or public speaking can be directed to the proper avenues. Everything else is to be ignored.” The Gerald Andersen Twitter account follows exactly three other accounts: Barack Obama, God, and Marina Hyde, a UK columnist he admires. Yet he is followed by almost three thousand people, although Victoria says at least half of them are probably robots, or bots, as she calls them.
“It’s just that this one—it’s a woman named Aubrey. I mean, her handle is DreamGirl@Aubrey. The avatar is, um, your book.”
“There is no Aubrey. How can Twitter allow this?”
“I checked, but it doesn’t violate the terms of service? It’s pretty common, I think?”
He can’t help himself: “Victoria, are you asking me questions or telling me these facts?”
“Telling you? I mean, telling you. This isn’t a violation. Because Aubrey’s not real, she—he—isn’t really trying to deceive anyone.”
Gerry gets that. He follows God, after all. Although only on Twitter.
“So I care about this because—”
“I thought you should know about the content?”
Is it so wrong that he wants to hold her head under water every time she ends a sentence on a rising note?
“What is the ‘content’?”
“Yes, well, I think I should probably show it to you, or paraphrase it, or just—”
“Victoria, please tell me what this ‘Aubrey’ is doing that has you all bollixed up.”
“She was tweeting about your penis.”
At least she finally managed a declarative sentence.
1975
THE TOWSON PRECINCT of the Baltimore County Police Department was relatively quiet on the Fourth of July. The not-quite-arresting officer did not bother to put Gerry and his friends in a holding cell, but left them on a bench where, one by one, the other boys were picked up. Alex, Sean, Steve, Roderick. Still Gerry’s mother didn’t come and she didn’t come and she didn’t come. It was almost dark when she arrived and she offered no explanation for the delay.
He had never seen his mother’s face so white and tight with fury, not with him. Not even with his father.
“What happened?” she asked once he was in her car, a secondhand AMC Pacer.
“There was this mass of wet leaves on the road and Alex was going a little too fast and he lost control—”
“The police said there was beer in the car.”
“It wasn’t our beer.”