Four New Messages

EMISSION

This isn’t that classic conceit where you tell a story about someone and it’s really just a story about yourself.

My story is pretty simple:

About two years after being graduated from college with a degree in unemployment — my thesis was on Metaphor — I’d moved from New York to Berlin to work as a writer, though perhaps that’s not right because nobody in Berlin works. I’m not going to get into why that is here. This isn’t history, isn’t an episode on the History Channel.

Take a pen, write this on a paper scrap, then when you’re near a computer, search:

www.visitberlin.de

Alternately, you could just keep clicking your finger on that address until this very page wears out — until you’ve wiped the ink away and accessed nothing.

However, my being a writer of fiction was itself just a fiction and because I couldn’t finish a novel and because nobody was paying me to live the blank boring novel that was my life, I was giving up.

After a year in Berlin, with my German language skills nonexistent, I was going back home. Not home but back to New York, I was going to business school. An M.B.A. It was time to grow up because life is short and even brevity costs. My uncle told me that, and it was his being diagnosed with a boutique sarcoma that — forget it.

Yesterday by close of business was the first time my portfolio ever reached seven figures, so if every author needs an occasion, let this be mine. Sitting in an office when I should be out celebrating my first million — instead remembering these events of five years ago to my keyboard, my screen.

But as I’ve said this is not about me — no one wants to hear how I’m currently leveraged or about my investments in the privatization of hospitals in China.

I met Mono — I’ll always think of him as Mono — only once, a week before I left Neukölln forever. Left the leafy lindens and sluggish Spree, the breakfasts of sausages and cheeses and breads that stretched like communist boulevards into late afternoon, the stretch denim legs of the artist girls pedaling home from their studios on paintspattered single speeds, the syrupy strong coffees the Kurdish diaspora made by midnight at my corner café and its resident narcoleptic who’d roll tomorrow’s cigarettes for me, ten smokes for two euros.

I was at a Biergarten, outside on its patio overlooking the water. The patio was abundant with greens: softly flowing ferns, flowers in pails, miniature trees packed into buckets to cut down on the breeze from the brackish canal. It was summer, still the evenings sometimes blew cool. Not this one. This evening was stifling. A few punks, scuzzy but happy, sat mohawked, barechested, feeding decomposing mice to their domesticated ermine. I was about to follow suit, had my shirt halfway up my beergut when he sat down — just when the sun was coming down.

Prose descriptions are safer than photographs (pics) and movies (vids). No one would ever identify the hero of a novel, if he’d come to life, solely by his author’s description. Let’s face it: Raskolnikov—“his face was pale and distorted, and a bitter, wrathful, and malignant smile was on his lips”—is not being stopped on the street.

Across from me Mono sat reading that novel, in English of course. And English led to English — he asked what beer was I drinking, an Erdinger Dunkel, and ordered the same.

To make conversation I said, Too bad we’re being served by the Russian. The Turk — turning my eye to the eye of her hairy navel — is way hotter.

This is not to my credit. To his he just smiled.

It was a tight smile, lips chewing teeth, as if he wasn’t sure how fresh his breath was.

I don’t know why Mono made such an impression on my premillionaire self — maybe because when you’re young and life’s a mess, the world is too: young and messy. It could also have been the beer, hopped on malt, its own head turning my head to foam.

I was in my mid 20s, actually in that latter portion of my 20s, spiraling, like how a jetliner crashes, toward 30.

But Mono was young.

He had his decade in front of him.

We covered 30: scary, scary.

Also we discovered we were both from Jersey — me from south, he from central, but still.

Why here?

It was important to deliver this offhand. All expats worry about coming off spoiled or ludicrous, insane.

Why I came here was to write a book, I offered, which isn’t working out.

He brought his mouth to his beer, not the other way around. The beard was still growing in.

He swallowed, said, Achtung, and as the sun disappeared told me this story.

Back in Jersey — this was only two months before the time of his telling but anything Jersey felt like years ago, amenitized among diners and turnpikes — Mono was a deliverer.

Like a priest, delivering from sin?

Or a recent arrival from Fujian with the fried rice, the scooter?

No, what Mono brought were drugs.

Drugs paid well but only for those actually supplying. Mono merely supplied the supply. This was not the ideas economy—whatever was supposed to save our country once we’d stopped physically making anything of value.

This was effort, was pick up, drop off, keep all names out of it and deal exclusively in cash. (FYI, Benjamin Franklin is one of only two people featured on bills never to have been US President.)

Mono worked for a man — and he was a man with multiple children and women and not a lost lanky kid like Mono — who called himself Methyl O’Nine (as in cocaine, benzoylmethylecgonine, also zero and nine were the last two digits of his retired pager).

He was a short, slim but muscled, comparatively black man with a ritually dyed henna fleck of a goatee discreet beneath voluminous dreads like plumbing gone awry.

Mono spent weekends moving his product.

Methyl was a hushed seclusive type — not just careful but temperamentally dervish in his sandals and gangsta hoodies — and never wanted his deliverers to know where he lived or with whom he supplied and so he’d meet Mono as he’d meet all the others who did Mono’s job, on discrepant dim corners in Trenton.

Whenever he called Mono went and Mono went wherever Mono was called, which meant a lot of driving the Ford from near campus to fields and wharves and the parkinglots of midpriced restaurants.

Ford: bad brakes, transmission with the shakes, used to be his mother’s.

Campus: a fancy private university approximately an hour south of New York.

Methyl’s customers were mostly students — the idle rich, studiously clubby douches and athletic fratters, the occasional slumming neo-Marxist — but there were also the professors both adjunct and tenured. Some needed the drugs to write the papers, others needed the drugs to grade the papers, all needed the drugs — which they’d snort from atop the papers with rolled paper bills.

The students lived in student housing, the faculty lived in faculty housing (most student and faculty housing was identical), but Mono lived just outside Princeton — sorry, my mistake — in a collapsing bleachers of an apartment complex tenanted exclusively by the lowest paid support staff: the sad diabetics who mopped up the home game vomiting and this one security guard who protected the academics on weekdays but on weekends was regularly arrested in spousal disputes.

Mono hated being thought of as a dealer, as a danger. No respect for his opinion, no regard for his mind. And so he’d intimate deadlines, make allusions to debt, often just outright say it.

Enrolled but in another department.

Grothdyck? I snoozed through his seminar last spring.

I’m not sure if any of the students believed him, though I’m not sure what reason they’d have not to believe him and anyway it wasn’t exactly a contradiction to be both enrolled and an impostor, a fine student and seriously druggish, deluded.

Mono’s father had taught mathematics at the university — he’d made major advances in knotted polynomials, applied them to engineer a tamperproof model for voting by computer — and so was sure his son’s application would be accepted, despite the crappy grades.

But it wasn’t, it was rejected.

When he finally sold the house and moved away to chair the math department of a school in California — this was about six months before Mono and I sat together over beers in Berlin — Mono decided to remain.

Mono’s mother had died — an aneurysm after a routine jog, a clean body in a bloodless bath — three years before these events. Her death was why his father had wanted to move, though Mono thought his failure to have been admitted to school had an influence — his father’s professional humiliation (Mono was a professional at humiliating his father).

And the car his mother left behind precipitated Mono’s fight with his father — when the professor began dating a former student or began publicly dating her. She’d brought the largest veggie stix ’n’ dip platter to the gathering after the funeral.

She was also from Yerevan — super young and super skinny and tall with curly red hair curled around a crucifix that oscillated between the antennal nipples of her breasts — and as long as we’re confusing ourselves with chronology, she was just two years older than Mono.

His mother’s ailing Ford became his because his father already had a convertible.

Then one afternoon his father asked, Could you lend Aline your car for the day? She wishes to consolidate her life before the moving.

Mono said he said nothing.

His father tried again, Could you drive her yourself, to assist with the boxes?

Mono explained:

That was his father’s way of telling him that Aline was coming to Cali.

My mother’s car? Mono finally asked.

But you can forget about Aline. She’s pregnant with Mono’s half brother in Palo Alto and this is her last appearance.

At the time Mono’s name was not yet Mono. That name was as new as Berlin.

Like monolingual, he’d said when we shook hands (his hand was sweaty).

Whereas the surname he’d been given was much more distinctively foreign. Not that he was supposed to divulge that name to his customers — to them, until he ruined himself, he was only Dick.

To get him to loiter outside your dorm or stand around licking fingers to count bills on the rickety porch of an offcampus sorority, you dialed Methyl, who’d say, He be calling a minute before he shows. Name of Dick.

Dick would usually show up within a half hour and though he was supposed to only get paid and leave, he never followed Methyl’s instructions.

Instead he’d play older brother, stacking used plastic cups, making troughs of new ice, holding class presidents steady upsidedown for kegstands, reveling in free drinks and ambient vagina until recalled to work with a vibrating msg: NW6, say (Trenton’s North Ward location six, where he’d make the night’s next pickup — Methyl didn’t trust anyone out with more than three deliveries at a time).

Dick stayed out later the later in the night he was called and so on a 3 AM delivery to a party that had run out that a colleague, Rex, had delivered earlier that evening, a party pumping for six or seven hours already through music playlists both popularly appropriate and someone’s stepdad’s collection of Dylan bootlegs and whose mixer juices and tonics had been exhausted, Dick would not be moved, especially not when a girl — the same girl who’d called Methyl, who’d told his deliverer to expect a female customer — threw arms around him and said:

They sent you this time!

Dick, who prided himself on remembering all his customers, couldn’t be sure whether this girl, Em, was pretending to remember him or just wasted — and this should have been his first warning.

The couch, the absorbent couch, furniture in appearance like a corkscrew coil of shit — brown cushions, black backing worn shiny — soaking in the boozy spill and smoke of years, intaking fumes and fluids through the spongy membrane of its upholstery. They sat there, he and this girl who knew him only as Dick—this townie fake gownie and though he didn’t know it yet the daughter of a Midwestern appliances manufacturer who maintained, this daughter did, upward of thirty anonymous weblogs: Stuff to Cook When You’re Hungover, Movies I Recently Saw About Niggers, My Big Gay Milkshake Diary, The Corey News (which warned of the depredations of child stardom), What I’ve Heard About Bathrooms in North America—all irregularly updated but all updated.

They sat doing lines — is that my line? that’s your line? this line’s mine — and all was weightlessly intimate until Em turned to him and said:

This is from yours right?

Dick didn’t answer immediately so she asked again.

This is on you?

Dick said, Sure.

Sure?

Whatever. We’ll figure it out.

Em said, No not whatever. No figuring. Say it for me!

He felt like he had to stop himself from peeling her lips off her face as if they were price stickers, like they were designer labels as she said again:

Say it for me! This is your supply.

He said, This is your supply.

Em smiled.

OK, this is my shit. This shit is mine.

And she laughed and said, Dick! I’m so glad they sent you!

And he said, Actually only people who work for me call me Dick. My name’s really Rich.

Rich?

Richard.

Rich hard what?

I’d show you my license, if I had it.

He’d been craving this opportunity to brag.

I was jumped last month in Philly, rival dealers, took my narcotics and wallet (a lie: he’d been drugfree on his way to a bartending job interview, the muggers barely pubescent, three kids as stubby as their switchblades).

You don’t carry ID?

He reached into a pocket, found his passport, passed it around.

Em flipped through it, Did you enjoy Mexico?

I went with my parents.

You were an ugly child.

Discussions were: over changing the music and so changing the mood, about what band was good or bad in which years and with which personnel — is playing the bass harder than it looks? does a true leadsinger have any business playing guitar?

Anyway what kind of person would say which—personnel as opposed to lineup? leadsinger as opposed to frontman?

Is this coke cut? is all coke cut? and how is that not the same as lacing?

What innocents they were, Dick thought — the purity was theirs, not the drug’s.

This one guy said, There was this girl I used to go out with who was the transitional girlfriend of a kid who starred in like every fucking movie.

Who was it? the party wanted to know, what every fucking movie was he in?

The guy told them.

Famous right? crazy crazy famous? Girls saved his face into screensavers, produced ringtones out of his voice. She was with him for three months off and on. Then I was with her and after our third or fourth date we had sex and you know what she said to me after?

What?

She said: Peter, before you having sex was just like staring at the ceiling.

Like what?

Again: like staring at the ceiling.

And that night that coital praise became an inside joke, like, whatchacallit, a party trope.

When someone went to the kitchen, opened the fridge, and retrieved another beer for you it was, Before you drinking beer was just like staring at the ceiling, when someone tapped out a thick fat line for you with their parents’ Platinum Plus Visa card on the glass slab tiered above the baize bottom of the house’s threequartersize poker table it was, Before you coke was just like staring at the ceiling, then that prefatory endearment was dropped with the tense and it was only, This couch is just like staring at the ceiling, This floor is just like staring at the ceiling, This ceiling’s just like staring at the ceiling.

You had to be there but you’re lucky you weren’t.

Somebody left to buy the ingredients to bake a pie, somebody left to buy a pie, somebody left.

Cakes v. pies were debated, cupcakes v. muffins were too, the salient differences between them, the identities of the world’s greatest lacrosse players were discussed, various names proposed both at the college level and pro. Pressing questions asked and answered: What’s more degrading, working as a stripper or working as a maid? What’s the best position to have re: Iran — preemptive strikes or sanctions inevitably targeting women and children? What’s the best sexual position for virginity loss — for a man, for a woman, for a child? Is there a future for campaign finance reform after the veritable abortion of Citizens United v. FEC? If you could repeal any amendment to the Constitution, which (no one allowed anymore to pick the first ten, whichever amendment repealed Prohibition, or the thirteenth, fourteenth, or fifteenth)? If you were a fart, what type (how wet, what smell)? Ten Most Mortifying Moments? Most egregious party foul? If you could describe your entire life in only one word to only one dead grandparent, which grandparent and what word?

Etc.

Mono’s apartment had been advertised as a one bedroom but having remitted the deposit he admitted to himself, why not, it was a studio. What the realtor maintained made it a one bedroom was a small little nothing nook by the door so minuscule that whenever Mono wanted to open the door he had to move the television onto the bed. His TV slept better than he did. The door’s peephole had been blackened for a robbery. The window opposite gave onto parkinglot, he never kept it open, gas. On the floor, lotto stubs, scratchers he’d scratch with teeth. Underlabeled whiskey under the label. Flies at the bottom of a liter of cola. In the bathroom clothing hung from the showerhead smelling alternately feculent and moldy. The sink was mustached with shavings. He’d been using takeout napkins as toiletpaper for a month. The sounds he’d hear by morning were those of mice the size of his pinky sprayed newborn from the walls or, once, the whining die of the smokedetector’s batteries. The apartment had no light because the bulbs had burnt out and he never remembered to replace them. Anyway Mono was rarely home at night and the television was enough light and the computer was sufficient too.

Mono was ISO work. He was perpetually interviewing and applying himself to applications because what’s life for a man in the middle?

Interrupting binges where if you didn’t have what they wanted you yourself weren’t wanted.

Only feared.

Meeting people furtively but trying to be kind. Yet having that kindness misinterpreted.

I don’t care what you think about the Yankees’ outfield, one kid said, I just want my fucking drugs.

Yankee wants his fucking drugs? Mono unsure of what to say.

The kid apologized.

Accidental, his initial involvement. Mono had begun delivering when he began owing Methyl money — short one night on an eightball he was supposed to have split before a food court coworker bailed (that one week Mono worked at Quaker Mall).

He knew he had to get out when this past New Year’s down the shore at a condo shuttered for the season a fierce former valedictorian who’d strolled with him along the snowy beach had said, Let’s continue this conversation some other time — a convo about renewable energy — like when I’m sober and you’re not my dealer.

Mono had had sex with her lesbian friend that night: she was stretchmark mangled, solicitous. She’d feigned abandon, collapsed on the bed, but just when Mono wanted to fall asleep she went to the bathroom to brush teeth, which was tender. The next morning she picked his jeans up from the floor and turned the pantlegs rightside out while Mono repositioned the pair of athletic socks in his jacket’s breastpocket — an advertisement for his packing a gun. That was the only time he’d had sex this year.

The résumé he’d been sending around he’d falsified: his experience including six months as executive assistant in a film production company he’d created, a year as a consultant to a pharmaceutical consulting firm for whose HR hotline he gave his own phone, figuring he could talk drug distribution with the best — while his other references tended toward the suspiciously familial: his cousin who’d developed a dating website and was too lazy busy getting laid to pick up the phone, another cousin who did the ordering for but did not own as Mono had stated Trenton’s North Triangle Liquors — though when it came to education he demurred: granting himself only a B.A. if cum laude, supplemented vainly by a Dean’s Award in English.

Despite this, he’d become inured to rejection: Never called back by that Suburban Poverty Task Force that needed someone with a liberal arts background to disorganize their archives, bend paperclips into helicopters and swans. Refused by that talent management agency requiring a front office rep. (he was overqualified, they qualified). A limousine driver, a limo dispatcher (ditto). Each being the juniormost position each business offered.

Monday punctually at noon the phone rang and Mono answered and a voice said, Mr. Monomian (the pronunciation was passable), I’m calling from Skilling Militainment Solutions.

Mr. Skilling, Mono said.

There is no Skilling. This is O. J. Muggs, recruiter, ret. capt. Marines.

Mono, sitting up in bed, said, Sir.

I’m afraid we can’t offer you the position.

You can’t? The position? But I haven’t even been interviewed.

You won’t be. This does not constitute an interview. Please say yes, indicating your understanding.

No I don’t understand.

Don’t fool yourself, son. Not even civilians are exempt from civility. Security isn’t just armed convoys, it’s also a sound reputation.

What’s unsound about my reputation?

What you do in private is your business, until it becomes public, and then it’s your employer’s business, especially if your employer’s employed by the government of the United States. War’s all about image — and effective chaplaincy and counterinsurgency.

Come again?

You need to clear your profile, son.

My profile, what about it?

Your presence, you need to clean your presence.

I’m not following, and Mono canvassed his apartment, wondering whether the man had a camera focused on him or was just intuitive.

The internet, Muggs said, are you aware of your internet?

Mono was not aware of his internet. He’d never made a habit of googling himself — it was too depressing a venture.

Previously his life had passed undetected by bots. His life too modest for hits, too meek for the concerns of blogpostings and tweets.

Mono had always taken such paucity personally — virtual presence being, to him, presence nonetheless.

Whenever he searched there were only two results, two matches found: the first listing his name along with others of his class from Princeton High, the second aggregating what had to be all the names of all Jersey high school graduates ever to redirect them to wealth management services and medical tourism sites.

But now still abed, after ending the phonecall, tugging his computer close and keying in monomian—typeable with two fingers, every letter but one kept to the right of the keyboard — he found a third.

The blog was called Emission.

The link was that optimistic bright blue that after Mono clicked would turn to the drab abused and nameless color of vomit.

The post’s heading, RICHARD MONOMIAN.

Mono withheld his vomit.

He scrolled to the end and the post was signed with that single name, Em, timestamped midday the day before.

But just as he was about to read the whole post from the top his computer emitted a pop — his father was messaging him over chat:

Greetings Diran!

That was Mono’s birthname, before Richard.

Why are you not returning my calls?

Mono messaged:

cant talk now dad, then deleted.

Mono messaged:

its rich dad, then deleted again.

His father messaged:

Diran it is my hope you are not ignoring me.

Mono clicked the chatbox shut, blocked his father from chatting.

He read on:

Friday night @ party with RICHARD MONOMIAN. He brought ‘snax.’

Wink! wink!

Thats what he does for a living. He brings snax that are OK priced but also of crackhead quality.

Anyways.

Were all just hanging out smoking getting our drink on telling stories about former bfs and gfs when RICHARD MONOMIAN tells us this story.

About another party he went to.

A high school party.

Now when the guy who brings the snax begins doing the snax and telling stories about high school you know its time to bag for home but for some reason we didnt.

This was spring break, end of senior year.

Before P’ton, obvs.

It was a big houseparty at a big house with the hosts parents away — remember those?

It ended with everyone oblitermerated passed out on random beds in random rooms and RICHARD MONOMIAN searching around for an empty bedroom to crash in.

And he found like a guestroom or spare for using the computer or phone in room and there was a bed in the corner or like a foldout sofa.

A girl was sleeping.

RICHARD MONOMIAN said he didnt remember her name but even if he had remembered it and told me I wouldnt repeat it, thats not my style.

RICHARD MONOMIAN said this sleeping girl was cute, I guess not cute enough to rape.

Instead he pulled his pants down below his ass tits and pulled down his underwear also.

RICHARD MONOMIAN grabbed his penis and stroked — he stood over her and stroked it!!

Dick fisting his shit! Dick fisting his shit!

Dick grabbed his hard dick hard and below him the girl kept sleeping.

He was on MDMA I think.

I think ecstasy and weeds.

Highlarious!

Suddenly he came: RICHARD MONOMIAN blew a load that landed in her hand.

RICHARD MONOMIAN said he didnt wipe it up because he didnt want to wake her, he just pulled up his underwear and pulled up his pants and fell downstairs and out the door for home.

Thats it.

All the deets I have.

Retardedly I didnt take a pic of him last night and cant find a pic online but Im sure one of my readers can and if you can then fwd: because I sometimes need a pic to look at to get less horny, Subject line: because I sometimes need a pic to look at to get less horny,

(And if youre that girl who woke one morning on a strange sofabed in a strange house with a jizzy palm worried about what happened, maybe you ran out to get tested, maybe you ran out to get the pill — this is it, youre welcome, be careful where you fall asleep, sista.)

At least his pic wasn’t available. That was the best benefit of his previous anonymity.

Mono tried to remember what pics of him were around. Not many, few digitized. School portraits, a few snaps with friends moved away to colleges, and family poses, most of which his father had storaged. Easier to imagine a picture of yourself than to imagine yourself. He thought, why is it so hard to remember colors? And did anyone else think of death while being shot for an employee ID? (Besides the passport the only photo of himself he had was just that, from that week pretzeling at Quaker Mall.)

He stayed in bed, blowing through what cash he had left ordering to his door medium pizzas and Asian noodle decoctions waiting for Methyl to call with his next assignment as the legitimate world with its legitimate rewards stopped calling, stopped responding to his calls — him sitting up in bed, with the pillow verticalized between his legs as stuffed buffer between computer and any Monomians to come, searching himself, researching his name, “within quotes.”

Three results went to four when another blog he suspected this Em of hosting linked to the Emission, then four upticked to six when two readers of those blogs linked up from blogs of their own.

Sometimes it was just an embed singly described, Disgusting, other times it was a capsule blurb that transclused: Em, a college girl from Jerzee who’s been keeping a party diary, writes about a guy masturbating on top of a sleeping girl … NSFW.

But that was a particularly responsible example and most of the keywords were rather: Wrong, Sinister, This is just totally scrotally insane.

People thinking this funny precisely because it was legend, social lore — it didn’t happen to them:

next time sleep with an umbrella

next time my girls not in the mood im gonna give her a monomian

cumbrella lol!

wear rubbers!!

Within a week a hundredplus results all replicated his name as if each letter of it (those voluble, oragenital os) were a mirror for a stranger’s snorting — reflecting everywhere the nostrils of New York, Los Angeles, Reykjavík, Seoul, as thousands cut this tale for bulk and laced with detail, tapped it into lines, and his name became a tag for abject failure, for deviant, for skank.

To pull a Monomian.

To go Monomian.

Fucking Monomial.

No one, had you asked them, would have thought he was real. Only he knew he was real. And he only knew that, he thought, by his suffering.

Mono was on the internet all day but did not masturbate. Porn sites went unvisited. He’d type in half their addresses then stop and delete, hating himself because the computer couldn’t hate him instead. The nonjudgmental nature of technology, if technology could have a nature — that struck him as unfair.

He restrained himself from leaving comments on Em’s blog or from responding in any way by starting to blog himself because already people were posting under his name, were posting as him: Richard_Monomian, Rich_Monomian, Dickhardmon, Monosturbator69, each claiming to be “the real meatspace Monomian.”

IRL I jerked in my own hand then inseminated her preggers (wrote Modick).

Actually the bitch was so passed out I gave her an anal alarmclock (wrote Dicknass).

The more the commenters commented, the more accurate even their inaccuracies felt, the more their elaborations felt essential.

The weekend after losing out on a janitorial job then failing to obtain two other minimumwage positions (jeggings folder, organic waiter), Mono began searching for something else, not for this proliferating porno about himself but for a number of basic variations: “how to get something off the internet,” “how to remove stuff from the net,” “slander on the web,” “info on online defamation and how to fight it,” “how to destroy a website entirely forever,” “is destroying a website technically legal if the work is contracted to someone in another country,” “how to knock out someone’s server if you don’t know anything whatsoever about hacking or even what servers are.”

He found a forum dedicated to cybersecurity that counseled a girl whose exboyfriend had uploaded a sex vid to contact a lawyer and sue for removal plus compensation.

One chatroom included a comment from a genuine lawyer—“A Verified User”—advising a man whose wife had put up a website accusing him of being a compulsive gambler and not paying child support to contact him, he’d send a Cease & Desist for cheap.

That must have worked because the link www.myexhusbandrandyisalyingdegenerate

teenfuckinggamblerwhosbadinbedanddoes

notpayforhisonlychildsfoodandmedication.com was no longer functional.

Also the lawyer advised him to pay his child support: Buddy, that’s just Christian.

Mono searched for lawyers in his area by typing “lawyers in my area.” The number one result was a website called “What Is a Good Web Site to Find Lawyers in My Area.” Like digging a hole to find a buried shovel to use to dig a grave.

Then Mono typed in “how to get people to take down libel from online,” adding the local zipcodes.

At the bottom of the first page of results, the tenth hit, was a link to a digital paralegal.

That’s what the header said, Da Digital Paralegal.

Mono didn’t hesitate, his connections did: B4UGO Network gave two bars, Chuck’s Den gave three, Sally Sally Wireless Home — finally full strength.

He arrived at a site either terribly lowtech or trying to keep the lowest of profiles: a page all blank white like paper with only a single address centered, the contact, dp@dadigitalparalegal.com, not even clickable — it had to be typed into the To: line of an email.

What Mono sent this address was tentative, vaguely worded: Hello, my name is Richard and I am inquiring after your services, and though it was very late at night — though these were his normal working hours, beginning around midnight when, if Methyl had called, he’d be commuting the speed limit down U.S. 1 South between campus and the stripjoints of Trenton — the DP wrote him back within the minute, before he had the chance to signoff, amid a last reloaded scan of the news:

Climate change was being called a sort of temperature socialism — it redistributed warmth to the colder months. This winter had set records. A woman gave birth to triplets, her twin to quintuplets. The father of all — the nondescript fertility doctor.

Elections don’t end wars.

The DP’s email, terse:

U still up — just call me, then it gave her number. Her name, appearing not as a signature by dully fonted macro but as if by regular typing, was Majorie.

Hello, Majorie?

No reason she’d let it ring ten times.

Yes, the voice lidless, up, what time is it?

You asked me to call.

No I know. I’m aware of my email.

This is Dick.

Dick who?

Reluctance then because he’d have to say it anyway, Richard Monomian, and then he spelled it out.

It’s good to meet you M-O-N-O-M-I-A-N.

Behind her voice he could hear a toilet flush.

How does this work?

You were rather unclear in your initial query. But let me tell you to start, investing in taxi medallions is 100 % safe and legal — a burgeoning business. I myself own ten I’ve leased at absurdly favorable terms.

You’ve lost me.

I have a comprehensive information packet if you’ll only give me your mailman address.

My mailman’s address? I’m calling about the internet.

A pause and then, mailman’s address is just a code, of course — if you were active in the Celebrity Privacy movement you’d have answered my mailman has no address, then we’d be talking business. I take it you’re no technophile.

No I’m a courier.

A courier. Is that your only problem?

Now after the toilet a sink ran. Majorie might’ve been washing her hands. Which Mono chose to take as the mark of a professional.

And you’re a paralegal?

In the interests of disclosure I’m a paraparalegal. It’s the same difference pretty much.

And where are you located? Could I come by your offices and talk?

Majorie gave a cough or burp, an unforthcoming eruction.

Excuse me, she said, I’m out of state.

Don’t you realize we have the same area code?

I prefer to do business over the phone.

Why?

Security.

Are you recording this?

It’s a federal law that you have to tell someone when you’re recording their conversation.

Are you telling me that you’re recording our conversation?

No.

Mono suspecting now that her office was her residence, which was a disaster, had to be. He heard — suspected he heard — junkfood wrappers crunch under slipper as she stalked around, as if testing the echoes of a floor’s worth of partially furnished rooms in an old drafty inherited house: from the reverberant bathroom she, they, seemed to be now in a larger room or long hallway.

She told Mono she could help him, she did this type of freelance all the time.

Her voice was backed by clacking keys or particularly strident cicadas.

Do what?

First I customize a letter for your situation then I email it to the webmaster or mistress of the originating offending URL — that’s uniform resource locator.

What does this letter say?

It’s your standard-issue unequivocal demand: remove the original post from both website and cache and post instead a short retraction.

Saying?

This post has been removed. Or would you prefer a public apology?

I think the less said about it the better.

Then I’ll ask the webmistress to sign her name to another email acknowledging the site falsified its information before sending that around to every linking site asking them to likewise take down content and threatening suit if they refuse to comply.

Every linking site?

Tell me this: Is what Em wrote true? Did you really spray all over that girl?

Mono, stymied, asked, We can’t be sure that Em’s her real name, can we?

Doesn’t matter.

How long is this going to take?

There’s no guarantee — the web’s like sweaty footwear: stuff lives in there forever.

Mono imagined the smell of her slippers — sweat: ammoniac, uriniferous, vinegar, chipotle sauce.

How much do you need?

I won’t accept payment in narcotics.

Could you get started tonight?

I’ll get started the moment you transfer $1000. Paypal to my email.

I’m on it.

Don’t worry, she laughed, I won’t fall asleep on the job, and only the next morning did he realize she was making a joke about him splooging all over women in their somnolence, which wasn’t funny.

hey kidderoos guess what Mama got today?

Re: that salacious stroking tidbit of earlier last week? … Just a note, below, after the jump.

Toward week’s end the Emission posted not any scripted retraction but a screenshot of the retraction request itself, accompanied by Em’s commentary:

This type of coercion has no legal basis whatsoever, Im not even prelaw and I know this.

So let me make this as clear as clear as clear can be, which on the internet MEANS CAPS:

I WILL NOT PUB A RETRACTION, Online Fidelity Fixers or whatever your ridongculous company is called that has no history anywhere, I dont think has ever been incorporated or registered or you get what Im saying and certainly has never filed taxes in the State of New Jersey [this hyperlinked to a state taxation page that said, “terms: ‘Online Fidelity Fixers’: No Record(s) Found”].

This story Richard Monomian told me is TRUE. He knows it is TRUE.

That he knows it is TRUE and nothing but the TRUE is why he hired you, Online Fidelity Fixers.

I looked you up globally, suckers!

What have you ever done? Your website hasnt been updated in two years [hyperlink to website]!

Who designed it, a retardy chimpanzee [hyperlink to vid of chimp, unclear as to whether retarded but still slurping its own feces]?

This email of yours is just a smear of yours truly. Funded by a desperate assaulter of women named Richard Monomian.

Who is also a dealer!

Whose coke is also BAD!

And you Mrs. J. K. M. Jorie, LA — l.egal a.ssistant requires an abbreviation, are you queerious?

This is amateur hour, yo.

By that later Thursday afternoon, the last waning work hours when bored deskbounds log on and comment to do anything but improve their own existences, tidy the file chains, or disburden the inbox, this post had racked up over 350 responses like:

MunchieZ: right on girl!

anonymous: u tell it!

anonymous: I am a practicing lawyer in the city and you Em are correctamundo as always.

jd: Im with u. I call bullshit.

m@jd: Bullshit!

bullshit: Bullshit! (first!)

anonymous: this letter is not even worth the paper it is not printed on.

(Hugger89 and go_deep like that comment.

That comment had a comment—see one reply: monomaniacal wtf!?)

Friday morning after googling himself and finding that post Mono called Majorie and got a voicemail that said: You’ve reached Broken Wings: Last-Minute Frequent-Flyer Miles Broker to the Bereaved.

He waited for the beep, Call me. This is unbereavable.

He lay back in bed perusing a magazine he’d found weathered wet and unsubscribed to in the hallway last week, read from the cover in a whisper—revista feminina—as if a foreign language had the power to save him from what he did understand (was the internet as virulent in Spanish or Italian, in German or French?).

He flipped the pages, past the makeup styles and recipe tips — what Mexicans had the kitchens for this? had the flatware, stemware, and jobless hours? — heading into an article headlined ¿qué es la depilación láser?

Mono wondered if he’d ever be able to masturbate again. Not above a sleeping stranger and not even to the internet, which had been sexually ruined for him — but perhaps to this revista, that tan woman of thumb proportions depilating herself on page 34?

The phone rang and Mono picked up.

It wasn’t Majorie but Methyl.

Which was good news — Mono having had no income in over a week. Had all of Jersey stopped getting — depilated?

I’m coming over, Methyl said.

Under the cashmere overcoat Methyl wore only a wifebeater, the chest hair coming in spirals like @ signs. Below were baggy jeans and between the jeans and beater was a full foot of red boxers exposed.

He came swaggering into the apartment, sat on the bed — there was nowhere to sit but alongside Mono, Methyl waiting as the TV was repositioned, returned to the floor.

This all? he asked.

Mono asked, That mean you’re giving me a raise?

Methyl had in his hands a gaming console as gray as a desiccated brain strangulated in black cords attached to two controllers.

It’s a new game, he said, still in development. I gave these city guys some tips on how to make it rawer, they gave me a copy of the beta.

He bent to fit plugs into sockets.

Balancing the console on top of the screen.

The TV showed a brick wall.

A man walked past the wall. Another man passed by the wall in a car. The man in the car lowered his window, yelled something indiscernible—Hooooooo!?!? — pumped one shotgun round that struck the walking man in the no longer walking head. The car continued, drove offscreen. The man’s head broke apart, spattering the wall in seven spots of sanguinary graffiti that dripped down to form a word with seven letters: Corners.

Kids crept up to the corpse, pulled spraycans from the pockets of puffies and tearaway trainers and tagged the brick.

One wrote 1 Playa—effective aerosol sound effect — the other scrawled 2 Playas.

I play the dealer, Methyl said, you play the snitch.

The screen was splitscreen so there wasn’t one wall now but two and they were different.

I’m gonna let you walk free for a while, Methyl said. Try and get a feel for the controls.

Mono the snitch walked to the end of the wall, which was the end of the sidewalk. He walked to the end of the screen but there was more screen. The next block was crowded with bodegary. Fat mamas pushed pushcarts stacked fat with bags of laundry, bags of rice. Hot mamacita hissed. Stolid old guy swept a stoop. Kids, rather trainee cholos, junior bangers.

A red blur burst from behind a tenement’s billboard — pigeon graphics flying wildly out of frame as Methyl lunged at his controls, pressed Pause.

This billboard’s trying to kill you. Playa’s from a rival gang.

Mono asked, What gang am I in?

You used to be in my gang but you snitched me out so I’m trying to kill you too. But also the red niggas want to kill us both. And then the cops. You stay away from cops. I’m taking us off Pause. The second I do just cross the street. Red nigga won’t get a clear shot.

Where’s the map? Mono asked.

Ain’t no map. Just gotta memorize the streets.

Memorize them how?

Lady Liberty knish take the A train, motherfucker! Don’t you know New York?

Not the outer boroughs.

We in Manhattan — me uptown, you down. I have it saved in memory to start my every game on 145th and Amsterdam — Playa 2 starts by default down at Delancey but you can program any block.

Then Methyl quieted and said, Ain’t like we in Staten Island.

Snitch heading north up Orchard.

Trendoid gastronomes. Theme outlets that had paid to be included in the game.

Methyl spinning sewer lids like record platters. The soundtrack robotic cucaracha.

Then the snitch stood and did nothing because Mono was watching Methyl’s screen half. The dealer was covering major blocks at a major clip shooting everything that moved — everything that moved that was malevolent. He took out pimps in parked cars, slaughtered whole drug deals and arms sales in dumpstered alleys and basements. Wasted lookouts execution-style. Then stole the drugs and arms for later resale. He stopped by a restaurant, ate soul food. He helped himself to seconds, a double order of biscuits to go. He stole a Mercedes coupe and drove off his half of the screen until the two screens converged with the car pulling up on Mono’s block.

Mono managed to turn around, fumbled.

Methyl, stepping from the Merc, held his gun sidewise, shot Mono in the face (button A to draw, B to cock to tricksy side, C to pull the trigger).

Screen nasty black with game blood.

You dead, Methyl said.

Me?

You fired too.

I am? I thought you’d come with work.

Methyl sat up, turned to him and said, Any other business you survive this. But the cops today, they online all the time.

People don’t know I’m him.

They will.

I’m fucking broke, bro.

The internet says you just that guy who whips it out. But I say you an onus.

Instead of unplugging the gaming console Methyl unplugged the TV, put the controllers atop the console on top, boosted the entire package.

Then he stood on the bed while Mono, getting the silence, got up to get the door.

With the TV’s powercord pocketed, Methyl stepped to the floor and walked out to the hall, saying without turning around, I was you I’d start thinking about how to change your name. Bro.

Without the television Mono’s apartment seemed both bigger and smaller, and worse.

He should’ve handled this himself, Mono decided Sunday night when he was down to his last thousand dollars and applying for credit cards online: should’ve found Em’s address or phone through pleading at keggers and honor society socials, then handwritten a letter or called personally, throwing his future on her mercy or just paying her off, throw her a couple hundred or even a thousand — that would’ve cost the same if not less and less worry.

He shuddered whenever the phone rang.

Majorie? He didn’t think Ms. Airline Miles Mogulette ever intended to return his call.

She sputtered, I hope you’re not recording this.

I last asked that of you.

Never mind. I’ve been talking to Tech.

Who?

My support guy.

Who guy?

My computer person.

OK.

But this is mondo illegal, shaky shaky ice. I never said that. I’ve never done this before.

Done what?

He lit a smoke.

I’m liaisoning with my liaison, my hacker. He’s going to hack into this Em woman’s blog and erase the original entry then he’s going to do the same to all the other sites, I think.

You think? trying to stabilize the ashtray on a knee.

Or else he’s going to send them all a virus that destroys everything but leaves no trace, I don’t know, I’m no gearhead, just a paraparalegal.

We’re talking additional costs?

The tray teetered, heaping.

It’s a sliding scale.

A slide beginning where?

We’re not prepared to quote just now. We’ll send you an email with the figure.

We?

Myself for project management but mostly my tools goon for the tool stuff.

And who is he or she exactly?

Richard, when it’s against the law I’m against naming names.

What are the risks?

We assume more risk than do you — that’s also why it’s expensive, if it’s traceable it’s to us.

But then you’re traceable to me.

Plus it’s time intensive — there are worms to code, firewalls to crack.

You sure you know what you’re talking about?

It’s not a minor undertaking, having to stealthify kludge all that daemon javascript and such — Tech was explaining it all just this morning.

Mono’s cigarette was finished except for the filter, the foam pellet he thought of popping into his mouth as if a pacifier, chewy.

I’ll call you back when the process is in process, Majorie said. Do you have any payphones in your neighborhood?

I have payphones in my neighborhood.

Find the number of one, making sure it’s not the most convenient but pick one a ways far out then email that number to me spaced over ten emails, one digit per email, you with me?

With you.

Then intersperse each digited email with other emails containing links to, I don’t care, hardcore penetration, but none of the emails can be sent from your address — be sure to open other accounts with multiple providers.

Didn’t I tell you I’m through watching porn?

Then send me more better news, Rich — I have no idea what’s happening.

There are wars on.

Mono sent her links.

On Wednesday it felt like winter was finally breaking. The ice could crack for the grass to sprout and a warm breeze could balm the parkinglots and roundabouts and it was fine — winter would be back next year. Mono would be shattered forever.

He put on his coat and walked to the only payphone he was sure of, located just outside the university’s main library — every student body could use that phone every day though they never did, they all had phones of their own that didn’t require booths. He’d recently forwarded Majorie a link to an article — a web exclusive, never printed in hardcopy — about the phonebook’s disappearance. They were going to stop universal distribution — this, the one book everyone could be in.

Students were coming out of the library but none clutched books, they held each other.

And a new beverage for a new generation, not bottles of water but bottled water, plastic, perspirant.

They didn’t need books because of the bags on their shoulders, which contained computers — tablets and pads on which they could read all that’d been written by anyone ever and also Em on Richard Monomian.

The phone rang but his rush to pick up was unnecessary.

Students, children essentially, pedestrated past as blithe as projected light.

He said, My mailman has no address.

Pigeons alighted on the pathway slabs, pecking at butts and clots of gum.

Was that the password?

You tell me.

We’re on track but also delayed.

Which is it?

Both. Plus I need that second thousand.

Behind her speech Mono made out the riddling whir of her computer’s cooling fan, the high screech of either passing sirens or neglected pets.

It wasn’t that it wasn’t spring enough yet or that it was sunset already — he was chilled from being scared, feeling himself recognized by all who passed. He remembered there had been another phone by the gym. Nothing remained besides a stanchion tumescent from a speck of foundation.

Can I call you back from my mobile?

And subvert our subversion — what kind of subterfuge is that?

I’m paying you — so you find a payphone, email me the number, set a time, and I’ll also call ten minutes late.

That’s precisely what I wanted to talk about. You have my invoice. I have material expenses.

Must be a reason I didn’t respond to your email about the next installment.

Richard, it might be better if we talked about this once you’re comfortably at home.

Mono had begun to suspect that this hacker of hers, this gensym guru he was never allowed to talk to, was not a person, not a man or woman and so not her lover as Majorie let on, claiming access to him at all hours: when Mono called from home bonged stuporous slack drunk at 3 AM on Thursday asking to be reminded whether they were trying to infiltrate the sites to remove the posts or just crash them with a Trojan she said, Let me ask him. He’s sleeping just right next to me. Then there’d be a murmur that had to be her respiration — Mono got the idea she never even took the phone from her mouth to imaginarily rouse this imaginary partner — until she’d say, Tech’s grouchy, not getting up. He had a rough day yesterday. I’ll ask him over breakfast and check in with you tomorrow.

Mono wondered how delusional Majorie really was, whether she’d invented an illusory male or, worse, she actually regarded her desktop itself as her lover: wedging its switches between her lips and flicking.

On the Friday noon call, which Mono also instigated — Damn, you missed him again! Techie just stepped out for frogurt! — Majorie was saying these blogs had incredible security.

These blogs that were just default regular and free for anyone to setup and whose platforms required no training for operation and were entirely intuitive to maintain — their protections were just topnotch.

It’s amazing, she said, all my attacks are repelled (she’d already slipped into the singular).

Mono grunted.

No offense works, I don’t know what’s wrong. I’ve followed all the instructions, took that extra class online, even signed up for the personalized tutorial.

Feels good I’m not the only one being scammed.

Which reminds me, Monday at the latest. Are you sending me my cash?

Monday I’m sending you a sympathy $100.

But there’s a program I need.

Your invoice said it was for a line of code.

I need both. Also have to pay the internet bill. Three months overdue. Not everyone’s a signal thief.

$100. No more payments after that.

Richard, we’re in this together, both our reputations are at stake. She posted my name! my real name!

Her name was Marjorie Feyner.

It was a Wednesday again, a new credit card had arrived, was activated by the ordering of Mexican muy picante, and Mono had begun to think about that name change. His computer booted to Word, the.doc scrolled boldly with his mother’s maiden name: White, Richard White, Rich White, R. White.

In search results for just the word monomian—unenriched by Richard — he was still the sixth or seventh, the first five or six being the man who’d named him.

But Richard White was limitless — it was a nothing name, a nothing being. There was a Dr. Richard White OB/GYN, a Richard White, Esq., “Rick” White the builder/general contractor, Richard White the accountant, the actor/voiceover artist, the character in multiplatform franchises, movies, and television shows (the internet tending to catalog other media and not differentiating between an actor’s name and a character’s), even a Catholic martyr or errant knight — Richard the White?

One self-declared as a pre-op transsexual.

Mono wondered had his father heard about this yet.

This was encouraging, this purity — reboot, restart.

But Mono didn’t know what the process was, what documents were needed to make such an alteration official, was about to search for the answer — after anyway replacing his appellation on his most current CV — when the phone rang.

Only one person called anymore, who said, Rich, I have another solution.

Try me.

I’ve had enough of this cracking crap — this password guess where you’re given ten attempts at access then the account’s frozen when you fail. Let’s get back to the proven methods.

Which methods would those be?

Mono got out of bed, determined he needed more room for his cynicism, opened the door and walked out to the hall. A dull clatter at his sneaks, he swerved to avoid the neighbors’ leaky trashbags, greasy bikes.

What’s that noise? she asked.

I’m going out for air.

He walked down the hall to the door to the staircase, down the two tottering flights to parking — entirely vacant at midday, it was a lot of lot.

The stairs and landing were also cluttered with bikes — inextricably engaged, their wheels, pedals, gears — locked to the railings. Mono maneuvered, steps following him, steps just behind him.

Suddenly he realized he’d ripped his phone from the wall with the charger still attached. He’d been dragging the cord behind him and turned to pick it up, stashed the scraping prongs and whatever length he could into his jeans’ pocket.

Rich, she said, I finally decided to forgo the protocols and searched around for variations on Em — any Emma, Emily, Emilia, or Embeth@princeton.edu. You’re not supposed to do that. Every resource says it’s better to abstract the adversary, best to keep them symbols: IP or an email. Person to person, face to face, that’s the nuclear option — no other way to go.

I searched that two weeks ago, Marj. You know how many Emmas and Emilys go to Princeton?

I found about 100 possibilities.

99 more than necessary. And before we go any further, tell me this, there was never any tech guy — it was all you just studying up.

Rich, forget Techie. He’s over. Moved out. I’ve moved on. The circumstances have become exponentially more dire. My name’s all over the net. Another blog even uploaded a pic of me fatass at the beach. From Richter, Richter, Calunnia, & Di’Famare’s summer Law Lounge back when I was still employed.

Mono had to restrain himself from running inside, finding the image himself.

You checked all 100? he asked.

I plugged all their names into the usual social sites, opening a few false accounts to lurk. I took pains, signed in strictly from public connections. One persona joined the Princeton Jell-O polo team, another a networking group committed to combating squirrel chlamydia on campus. Then I got inspired: I opened an account under the real name and title of a real person who didn’t have an account — an associate dean of academic affairs who taught undergrad humanities — who’d turn down a friend request from her? She asked to be friends with all the Ems, which gave me access to their profiles.

Impressive, Marj, but what did you find?

She’s an Emmanuelle. I’ve emailed you her profile pic. When you get home I want you to verify then delete.

I’ll be home in a second, Mono hurried back upstairs.

If you don’t respond I’ll know it’s her.

You can just stay on the phone with me for another minute and I’ll tell you right away.

Mono quickened through the hall.

First he googled images of “Marjorie Feyner,” uncovered that shorefront snap. She engulfed a bikini, held a plastic coconut, a fake hairy ball stuck with a straw. People were laughing in the waves — waves of surfboards and tubes — not laughing at her.

Everyone but her was tattooed.

Mono said, Bad strength of connection today. xxxprs laptop-BCrib, what a weakling.

In a new window a pic unfurled, Mono tugging its edge taut.

So? Marj asked.

It’s her.

Here Em was, but pixilated younger, with shorter blonder hair hanging in wiry bangs. Braces like microchips programming an exaggerated dentition.

She was deep jawed, Mono recovered the memory — a mouth of gluttonous proportions.

She’s a sophomore, major undeclared. I called the school, said I was her grandmother.

You should go easier on yourself.

I told school I wanted to send her a surprise package but lost her address — said I’d found her baby booties, stuffed them silly with favorite candy. The workstudy brat said it wasn’t their policy to relay that information. She suggested I call her parents — be in touch with your daughter, with your son-inlaw, she said.

How responsible.

So I searched her friends and identified her high school, searched the local phone listings and called who I thought was her mom.

You what?

Said I was a high school acquaintance of Em’s just transferring schools — I positively detested it at Georgetown — and did you have her address as I wanted to get together?

You know — for a drink, take some pills, go to a club, have some seat-down bathroom cunnilingus?

The mother offered her email but I said I’d prefer her street address as my computer had just crashed — it’s tragic, I lost everything.

You’re jinxing yourself.

She asked wouldn’t I rather she give me the phone.

Wouldn’t you?

I was afraid it’d be a mobile but she gave me the landline too.

And you did a reverse lookup?

I had to look up how to do a reverse lookup. You’ll find both on my next invoice itemized separately.

And you’re going to call or send a postcard? Or go over there yourself?

No.

Don’t tell me I should go.

No I’ve met a new man. I call him Alban. He’s Albanian. He works security at my multiplex for the big crowds on the weekends. I’m always wasting Sundays and we talk. He lets me into a double feature no problem. I made a quiche for him last week.

Not Alban, his real name was Enver. He was a recent immigrant, born in Tirana. He worked for a security company that had classified his language skills as Minimal. Before moving to the area he’d lived in New York, which is where all immigrants live until they sleep with their brother’s wife. Enver was not even attracted to her.

His brother’s couch was three-cushioned, comfy. And his job, his first job his brother vouched for him, wasn’t bad. Enver worked for a friend of his brother’s at a pizza joint called, coincidentally, Two Brothers. Albanians being swarthy and proximal to the Mediterranean by birth pretending they knew their dough and cheese and sauce. But Enver wasn’t allowed to make the pies. He was supposed to sit on a stool by the back door, held ajar by cinderblock, waiting until his brother’s friend’s minivan appeared on his monitor. Then he was to open the door all the way, accepting from this man, Arben, whatever he was handed. Electronics, often bags containing something that looked like flour but was not — it was heroin — and less often, bags filled with cash (the entire ring was busted).

Enver was lonely in Brooklyn. His brother came home late from Manhattan. His cousin in Staten Island hated Brooklyn. His cousin in New Jersey hated Staten Island. Enver understood no relevant geography. Across the way was a hair and nail salon. That’s it. No other fact or germane sensation.

He tried to make friends. Like when that one time he was allowed to work the register he didn’t charge three kids for three slices plus diet grape sodas.

They looked hungry, Boss, he said to his boss, a taciturn elderly American with an erratic scar across his neck in the shape of a dollar sign who was the only employee permitted to make the pies and the next time Enver was in back watching the monitor and the minivan pulled up, when he opened the door Arben smacked him in the mouth and said, You looked hungry.

Arben said that in this language.

One night Enver spun home, spread himself like a fine crust on the couch and started watching — the TV, like the fraternal oven, was always on.

Appropriately disappointing: it was a cookingshow, the woman in it was cooking.

Liridona, wrung from the shower, sat next to him.

The recipe was just some simple stirfry.

Peel your vegetables but lose your nutrients.

By the time the show had cut to commercial Liridona’s robe was floored.

Next morning he left for Jersey, pawning himself off on a cousin. His brother never found out, that’s why Enver was still alive with intact knees.

Enver said to his brother, Time for you to have babies, as if that explained his abandonment of the couch.

He went to sit for that test at a security company his cousin’s friend moonlit for, went to a stripmall themed Early American Grange, sat at a desk exposed to a recently foreclosed storefront’s glass — a former florist’s still perfumed — and pondered the questions.

They could use him, they explained, as store security — that was the best job, requiring some sort of intelligence and special training — with the worst being crowd control: bars and nightclubs, live events. Almost everyone was retired law enforcement. The proctor, a tubby Hispanic kid who taught communication skills at a community college (a frustrated standup comic), kept calling him “Erven,” then “Mile High” because the corrected Enver sounded like Denver. They laughed through the exam. “Juan will be back ______ fifteen minutes.” (A) in; (B) on; (C) with; (D) about.

Freshly flowering bushes and trees went out of their ways to impress beauty on the youth — the scads of polished khaki kids stalking the kempt paths, groping in the topiary. A frisbee flew overhead. Birds high up enough resembled frisbees. Another class earning credit by punting at soccer. Extraneous jackets were laid out for impromptu picnics. Water bottles wafting clarifying alcohol. A girl smoked a cigarette wedged between her girlfriend’s toes.

She came out of Reading Freud PSY 23090, unbound from Green Hall and onto the green, headed toward Chancellor for a coffee. Did she want it iced? Indubitably. Anything to go with that? No that will be all. It was like a phrasebook come to life. What a terrifically executed textbook exchange, why thank you.

Emmanuelle wore mosquitoeye sunglasses, a tshirt whose logo read Brand, her skirt never showed lines, no underwear map.

While she waited for change her phone rang, she took the call (from friend R., poli sci major, public health minor, in the midst of a shaming crawl back from a date the night before with a 33 year old iBanker in the city), skimmed milk into her coffee and half a packet of artificial sweetener without bothering to stir.

At the testudinal traffic light she crossed.

College students driving adult cars, vehicles actually too fancy for any adult and perhaps better never driven. They drove them impulsively, alternately absent then reckless as if they already had jobs to get to.

Nassau Street laid the boundary of campus.

Em caffeinated while walking, hollowing her cheeks, pursing for suction then chatty again. Such oversize overactive labials. Let’s imagine the waves radiating from her phone — what if they were visible? what if they were colored by her mood? Rainbows, refractive rainbows. Wavelets of talk coursing through the air, coursing daily through our own ears and mouths and minds — yet we’re never privy to that talk. Or we’ll become privy only when it develops into tumors on the brain.

Retail gave purchase to the quieter suburban.

At a corner with a receptacle she stopped, sipped her last, tossed the coffee inside — not a trashcan but an empty newspaper vending machine.

The day was warming, still not warm enough for flipflops — Em’s thongs to soles athwack.

She took two more blocks then rounded the corner: Victorians — two floors, three floors — windows that hadn’t been cleaned in failed semesters, porches in a slump. Stoops stooped. The lawns diseased.

Em stopped to tuck phone between ear and shoulder, scratched in her handbag for keys.

Enver crossed the street and waited at the bottom of the stoop until Em turned the key in the lock then he took the stoop in two steps and once on the porch gave her a smile of glittering fillings.

She kept the door open for him with a flipflop. Thinking he was the roofer?

She was still on the phone but on hold. (Her friend’s banker date had called, the slut beeped over.)

Enver entered, held the door.

She had a teensy stud in the left naris, a diamond pimple.

He waited for her to check mail.

Yes? Em turned to say, flicking hair into a quote behind the uphoned ear.

Enver closed his eyes.

He couldn’t talk while looking at her sunglasses.

What do you want?

She flipped shut her phone.

He said, I want you to change your blogs — opening his eyes only after remembering what Marjorie had told him — I want you to take what you say on your blogs about Mono Man down.

Excuse me?

She dropped the coupons received to the vestibular rug.

And then, he said, to send email saying this was wrong and made up by you to everywhere also.

Also?

Linked, he was straining, posted.

That’s impossible! flipping open the maw of her phone, with hardbitten pink polish pressing three buttons then the most commodious, Send — and when she repeated, I want you to know how impossible that is! Enver knew she was stalling, for time, to call, the police.

He swiped at her phone, knocking it to fade its ring through the air as she kicked him with a flipper all gawky, sending her off balance — tricky this kicking in a skirt — and though he put out a hand and caught her before she fell, which must’ve been his attraction to her, which must’ve been his, he knew the word from the only other language he knew besides this minimal language and Albanian, tendresse (there was so much his brother didn’t know that came to light in court: he’d labored a full year in Marseille), with his other hand he made a fist and punched her, driving his knucks into her skull cradled by his hand.

From the floor the ringing continued.

A CCTV camera awning a deli two blocks east caught him on the run — add that to the testimony of Em’s neighbor, a spooked Korean grad student Enver thrashed past on the stoop, spilling the kid’s bachelor cold groceries: fruit and cereals, sprouts, soy yogurt.

Ludicrous to go back to campus — cameras, everywhere, had him everywhere, running between surveillances. Cutting between frames.

He was as big as a movie to the cops, who had him in custody within three hours (picked up hiding in a basement playpen at his cousin’s in Plainsboro).

At the Biergarten I paid for Mono’s beers then checked my phone. I’d missed a few calls, had a few messages. Parents, delete. My landlord wanting to make a final Prussian inspection of the premises once my duffels had been shipped then get my keys. Girls, including one Amsterdam video artist with whom I had one unfilmable night. Do not del. The more attractive waitress, the Turk, was attempting Russian with the Russian, saying their do svidaniya. A foosball careered across its tabled pitch. A slot machine clanked from the interior dank.

Mono said, Naomi.

She was Mono’s cousin on his mother’s side.

They hadn’t spoken in years — Mono had last seen Naomi at his mother’s grave — yet it was she who saved him.

Both sets of parents had emigrated together, had already settled into Jersey and Ph.D. programs by the time they were Mono and Naomi’s age, both had graduated together (1982), had bought their houses and had their children at the same time (Mono and Naomi were born the same month, 1984), bought their BBQs, bought their inground pools, opened their email accounts — Mono related the success of this parental relocation, especially successful when compared with ours.

Though Naomi, unlike Mono, was said to have matured.

She was to marry a man so incidental to even his own self let alone to this tale that his name shouldn’t be recorded — let’s have tact, let’s try for it.

About two months before Mono’s exploits went viral Naomi’s mother called to announce the nuptials and guilt him into being there — New York — the tacky boathouse in Central Park.

She jotted his address for a formal invitation, said, We’ll catch up at the ceremony.

Mentioning, There’s a girl I’d like to introduce you to. She’s a nurse. She looks like A. Jolie.

I’m excited, was all he could say.

She said goodbye with: I called your father for your number. Don’t worry, the Poz is not invited.

Poz being Armenian.

Mono, who did not speak Armenian, knew it meant dickhead or equivalent.

Imagine gripping the back fat of that nurselet for the slow dances or having to replay the act behind his meme fame for his smuttier uncles in the bathrooms between the entrée and dessert — Mono didn’t want to go, but he had to go: he’d already RSVP’d.

Still he procrastinated, waited until the Friday before the event to ball his only suit into his backpack — the suit black crisp funereal, bought for his college interview — and drive out to find the drycleaner’s.

He remembered a cleaner’s adjacent to a tanning salon or ye olde historic sandwich shoppe.

Or else adjacent to both.

He didn’t google, wished to locate by memory alone.

An hour later returning, having stopped at a diner to park a reuben in his gut.

His suit would be ready only on Sunday, they opened at noon. He’d have to crawl into the suit in the car on the way to the bus or the train.

Out on the patio it’d become a clear summer night — not cloying anymore but breezy perfection — I couldn’t believe I had just a week of this left.

The smoke of our cigarettes the only clouds of the moon — closing time.

We were the only customers.

I wanted to offer Mono to pick up his suit, send it to him — airmail? or boat rate?

On me.

We haven’t been in touch.

Mono said:

Squadcars surrounded his building. He knew they were idling for him. For dealing, for whatever Marjorie Feyner had done — he didn’t know Em was in a coma until resettled abroad, his second night insomniac in Paris when he’d checked that life online at a café.

Circling back, circling the lot.

His backpack was slung over the back of the passenger seat and inside the pack was his passport, which clinched it (the last codex, his last account, those durable blue covers).

They could have his computer, have bed and bare walls. His password, his password for everything, was sdrawkcab (remember it “backwards”).

He drove his mother’s car to Newark International, abandoned it in Parking. He wasn’t in any databases yet. A ticket would be sold.