“Oh, right.” He rolls his eyes. “Too good for all that.”
She shakes her head. “Not at all. On the contrary, I’m too weak for it. I mean, everyone is, but I am especially susceptible to its false rewards, you know? It’s designed to addict you, to prey on your insecurities and use them to make you stay. It exploits everybody’s loneliness and promises us community, approval, friendship. Honestly, in that sense, social media is a lot like the Church of Scientology. Or QAnon. Or Charles Manson. And then on top of that—weaponizing a person’s isolation—it convinces every user that she is a minor celebrity, forcing her to curate some sparkly and artificial sampling of her best experiences, demanding a nonstop social performance that has little in common with her inner life, intensifying her narcissism, multiplying her anxieties, narrowing her worldview. All while commodifying her, harvesting her data, and selling it to nefarious corporations so that they can peddle more shit that promises to make her prettier, smarter, more productive, more successful, more beloved. And throughout all this, you have to act stupefied by your own good luck. Everybody’s like, Words cannot express how fortunate I feel to have met this amazing group of people, blah blah blah. It makes me sick. Everybody influencing, everybody under the influence, everybody staring at their own godforsaken profile, searching for proof that they’re lovable. And then, once you’re nice and distracted by the hard work of tallying up your failures and comparing them to other people’s triumphs, that’s when the algorithmic predators of late capitalism can pounce, enticing you to partake in consumeristic, financially irresponsible forms of so-called self-care, which is really just advanced selfishness. Facials! Pedicures! Smoothie packs delivered to your door! And like, this is just the surface stuff. The stuff that oxidizes you, personally. But a thousand little obliterations add up, you know? The macro damage that results is even scarier. The hacking, the politically nefarious robots, opinion echo chambers, fearmongering, erosion of truth, etcetera, etcetera. And don’t get me started on the destruction of public discourse. I mean, that’s just my view. Obviously to each her own. But personally, I don’t need it. Any of it.” Blandine cracks her neck. “I’m corrupt enough.”
A beat.
“Well,” says Jack. His eyebrows are raised. He was listening closely.
“I just . . . I want a life that’s a little more lifelike,” Blandine says. “Don’t you?”
The Samoyeds whine in tandem, eager for their walk. Jack looks at them gratefully, like they’ve delivered a long-awaited cue, freeing him to walk offstage.
“We have to go,” he says. “They really need to get outside. They have to piss and stuff.”
“Just one more moment.”
“Fine. But . . .” He studies her with a pained but stoic expression, as though receiving a flu shot. “Fine.”
“So what was this dinner thing about?”
“Oh, it wasn’t that big of a deal. I think it was just a prank.”
“What happened?”
“There was this dinner that all the politicians and big renovation people had together. Somebody, like, attacked.”
“Attacked?”
“Not exactly attacked. I don’t know; they keep using that word on the news, but it was more like a creepy joke.”
“What happened?”
“In the middle of the dinner, all this witchy shit fell from the ceiling, onto the food.”
“Witchy shit?”
“Like voodoo dolls and blood and bones and shit.”
“Real blood?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I think so.”
Blandine pauses, and something about the vacancy of her expression gives Jack the chills. Then the moment passes, quick as a moth, and she laughs. Jack, who has only seen Blandine laugh three times—once when he offered her a dead fish—involuntarily laughs along.
“You’re right,” she says. “It’s kind of funny.”
“I mean.” He chuckles, confused. “I guess.”
Blandine’s laughter fades as she paces the loft, examining the ceiling and bookshelves. Black-and-white photographs of Pinky with irrelevant politicians and B-list celebrities crowd the walls. “This is such a nice place,” she says.
“Blandine, we really have to—”
“Lucky dogs. They have better lives than we do.”
Jack sighs. “He really does love them.”
Blandine finds Maxwell Pinky, Vacca Vale developer and city council candidate, the most abhorrent of the Valley Destroyers, because he’s the only one who is from Vacca Vale. She considers him a traitor. His story is mysterious, and nobody knows who his parents are. Rumors suggest that his initial investment money resulted from a dark family lawsuit. To Blandine, Maxwell Pinky doesn’t seem orphaned so much as fundamentally parentless. It’s as though he emerged from the sludge of the Vacca Vale River, a jazzily dressed swamp monster willing to plunder his own home in order to eat. To overeat. On a table beside the entrance stands a fishbowl, empty of water but full of political pins. She remembers reading that Pinky founded Vacca Vale’s first dog park—as if that could possibly compensate for bulldozing a place as rare as the Valley. Above the kitchen, a large banner reads: maxwell pinky for vaccavale city council. “he knows the neighborhood!”
The quote is unattributed.
Blandine feels some herd of violence stampeding through her, toward the owner of this stunning habitat. She imagines fishing a pin from the tank, unfastening it, and dragging the sharp end down Pinky’s back. Drawing a tree.
“Do you interact with him much?” Blandine asks Jack.
“Pinky?”
“Yeah.”
“No, usually his assistant.”
“Who’s his assistant?”
“Guy named Paul.”
“How old is he?”
“I don’t know, college?”
“Do you know his last name?”
“Vana something? Vanacore? Something like that?”
Blandine makes a mental note to contact Paul Vanasomething. That’s how she’ll extract the travel schedule.
“Why?” asks Jack.
“I’m just curious about him. Aren’t you?”
“Paul?” asks Jack. “He’s not that interesting.”
“No, I mean Pinky. He’s thirty-five years old, and he’s basically colonizing our town.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” says Jack. “I think that happened a long time ago.”
“But you don’t think it’s problematic? What Pinky’s doing to us?”
Blandine squints across the loft, into Pinky’s bedroom, envisioning the doll she will place there, constructed entirely from Valley materials, fake blood in its mouth, hanging from a rope. Maybe she’ll cover the floor with sticks and bones. The entire bedroom is white: the rug on the floor, the walls, the bedding, the shelves, even the items on the shelves—white ceramic, white lamps, and books arranged to show their pages, not their spines. Maybe she’ll throw dirt all over his freaky white everything. Or maybe she’ll try a different approach, something new, something that Jack could never trace back to her. She could install a camera of her own, simply harvest some blackmail.
“Look,” says Jack. “I know what you want me to say. You want everyone to hate the Valley plan as much as you do. But I just don’t. A lot of people are excited about it, and I think you’re being sort of judgmental and shortsighted. I mean, a lot of people say it’s going to help our economy and make jobs and stuff. And I’ve only met him a couple times, but Pinky doesn’t seem that bad. From what I’ve heard, he grew up poor, he knows what it’s like not to have what you need, and now he wants to help Vacca Vale get out of the gutter. Sure, he’s making money off it. But so what, if it helps people at the end of the day? We need to get out of the gutter.”
Blandine turns to Jack. She pauses for a moment, examining him with interest.
“Also,” he adds, “you’re wrong to say social media is pure evil. Good stuff happens there, too. I follow a lot of activists and stuff. I learn a lot from them—like, ways to talk about things, new ways to think, petitions to sign. All that. Think about all the protests, all the people leading movements around the world. Lots of it wouldn’t have happened without social media.”
She feels her face flush, and she looks away from him.
“What?” asks Jack. “What?”
“Nothing,” she says. “It’s just—that’s a good look on you.”
He clears his throat. “What?”
“Expressing an opinion that contradicts the one in front you. It’s . . .” She drifts off, blushes harder. “It’s cool.”
“That’s a condescending compliment,” Jack says, but he looks helplessly pleased. He forces his grin into a weird scowl. “Why don’t you just leave, then? If you hate what’s going on here so much? Why don’t you move someplace else?”
“Like where? Mars?”