My First Book, page 12
He tells me it’s not bad, it’s the worst, and it’s the beginning of the end of everything. Every adult I know has their own beginning of the end. Everyone has monsters under their beds. My uncle has his newfound knowledge of incels. My grandma has the disappearing bees. My other grandma has the Russians. My mom thinks that cell phones are giving us cancer. She buys the whole family anti-radiation cases, but they won’t protect us. My dad says there is another cancer, and it’s called the Patriot Act.
A week before Halloween 2001, Congress passed legislation to strengthen national security. While children went trick-or-treating, collecting Laffy Taffy and SweetTarts in pillowcases, data collection began. Nothing was private anymore. Privacy was made up a long time ago by someone, just like filters and elves. My dad sees privacy as a right. He is afraid, but I am not because I cannot remember a time when I assumed that privacy was real. He tells me to be careful because I am being watched. I tell him that I like to be watched. I need to be seen.
Other people’s moms and dads must have explained this government surveillance thing to them too. I’m sure the cowboy could tell you all about it. PATRIOT is a shitty acronym for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001.
There’s this meme about being surveilled by our very own personal FBI agents. Knowyourmeme.com explains,
Government Agent Watching Me refers to a character referenced in jokes in which a person engages in conversation with a government agent spying on them through either their webcam or smartphone. Rather than sinister, the relationship between the agent and the user is usually sympathetic and emotionally supportive.
We know that when our laptops are open someone can see through the camera. We know that no message we send is private. Scary, but funny, but scary. We do all sorts of embarrassing things and our FBI agent watches. You ate a booger. You had a boy over. You spent all night searching for the perfect cowboy hat. You put tape over your camera. You got left on read. You watched some weird Wild West porn. You made a meme about the FBI agent. They saw it. They see it all and isn’t that funny? Isn’t it beautiful to be important enough to be watched? The government doesn’t think we’re important enough for health care, but to be watched, yes, of course, they can get that taken care of. We know that power is evil, but what if its agents are not? What if they are just like us? What if they could help us with our math homework, our flirtations, our little problems? What if they were our guardian angels? What if they are truly here to protect us? What if the protection we need is as simple as friendship, the gift of witness. Would that friendship look like this?
The Stanford cowboy is outside and getting belligerent. He’s breaking bottles with a gaggle of skater boys. I wonder how many people have been beaten to death with skateboards. I wonder if the cowboy can do a kickflip. I wonder if he will ever think of me again. The vampire-toothed girl is sitting on the curb waiting for her Uber. She’s alone except she’s not: her FBI agent is watching. It’s last call. Halloween is over or it’s beginning and it’s time to take the train home.
Three cops stand by the turnstile. I ask them what they’re dressed up as. They tell me that they’re cracking down on fare evasion. It’s no fair, but that’s just how capitalism works. The city would rather pay three police officers to make sure we pay to take the subway than have free public transportation. This is why I shouldn’t do coke. It makes me talk to cops. No fare. No fair. The next morning, on Twitter, I see a video of hundreds of students in Chile running together and hopping over the turnstiles as two police officers fail to stop them. That’s how revolution works. They can’t stop us all.
On June 27, 2019, three anonymous Facebook users created the event page Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us, scheduled to commence at 3 a.m. on September 20, 2019. The description reads, “We will all meet up at the Area 51 Alien Center tourist attraction and coordinate our entry. If we naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets. Lets see them aliens.” Two million people RSVPed and the event became the basis for a slew of memes. Over the following two weeks, “attendees” of the group made shitposts and satirical plans to storm the base, including one on July 5 from user Jackson Barnes that gained over ten thousand reactions. The plan reads,
Ok guys, i feel like we need to formulate a game plan, Ive put together this easy to follow diagram here for a proposed plan.
The basic idea is that the Kyles form the front line, if we feed them enough psilocybin and monster energy and say that anyone in camouflage is their step dad, and the entire base is made of drywall then they will go berserk and become an impenetrable wall.
Then the Rock Throwers will throw pebbles at the inevitable resistance (we don’t want to hurt them, we just want to annoy them enough to not shoot the Kyles as often). While this is all happening, the two Naruto runner battalions will run full speed around the north and south flank, and shadow clone jutsu, effectively tripling our numbers, and overwhelm the base (red circle).
P.S. Hello US government, this is a joke, and I do not actually intend to go ahead with this plan. I just thought it would be funny and get me some thumbsy uppies on the internet. I’m not responsible if people decide to actually storm area 51.
The soldiers of the first wave would be an array of meme characters, the expendables, Kyles, unvaccinated children, K-pop fans, Naruto runners, Karens, furries. Then the rest of us would follow safely and see dem aliens. I wanted to see dem aliens. I wanted to see what our government was hiding from us. So did two million other Facebook users. I figured maybe six people would show. Something like 150 actually went to Area 51. Others had a music festival instead of a raid. The west is no longer wild.
What percentage of a population needs to revolt in order for revolution? Only 3.5 percent, according to the math done by Erica Chenoweth, a professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, and that’s just for nonviolent change! “We are the 3.5 percent!” I imagine the internet people shouting as they made the west wild again and stormed the base.
Couldn’t we really have pulled it off if we tried? Isn’t that why the Air Force characterized the event as a possible humanitarian crisis and issued an official warning telling people not to come? But at the same time it was silly, Halloweeny, having to do with outer space rather than politics. I imagine some intern being called into a secret meeting, deep in the bunker, to brief government officials on what Kyles and Naruto runners are. I imagine the generals and strategists trying to wrap their heads around these meme concepts. I imagine their relief on the day of the raid when the revolution did not begin. I imagine the intern being promoted to FBI agent, my FBI agent. I imagine him watching me. I smile into my laptop’s camera. I hope he smiles back.
Pillow Angels
There are six lines of Vyvanse waiting on the iPad mini. One for Ottilie, one for Kaylee, one for Hadleigh M., and two for me. I already snorted so much that I remembered my entire Torah portion— —that’s how good this stuff is. I could dig a hole to China and save the Uyghurs. I’d be happy to take the SAT or the ACT here on this carpeted floor. I feel like I’m Saturday morning. I’ve just solved the murder of JonBenét Ramsey. I can’t tell you who did it. I can smell the 5G in the air. The whole world tastes like Pop Rocks on my tongue. Getting high is so fun. We’re going to stay up all night. No one is the boss of us.
Ottilie says she wants to take Greta Thunberg’s virginity. I tell her that one day I’m going to fuck Barron Trump. Kaylee has a nosebleed. Hadleigh M. licks it up. We talk like Alvin and the Chipmunks. Our words flutter around the basement like anime butterflies on CIA crack cocaine. Nothing is funny. Everything is funny. It’s all so good. It’s all so bad. We don’t even have our learner’s permits. No one can blow our minds. We’re best friends forever and ever and forever will be over soon.
* * *
Out of the girls at the slumber party, I have the newest nose. It’s small and straight, just like me, but natural, and it makes my whole face just work. I got it for my fifteenth birthday. You’d never guess I wasn’t born this way. As the anesthesia kicked in, the doctor told me the story of how, at my age, he fled North Korea. I dreamt of his hunger and mother and fear and worship and turnips as he cut into my face. My nose was his masterpiece, he said, it made it all worth it. The white tiger he had to shoot as he crossed the DMZ, the family he knows will be punished for generations because of his crimes, the guilt constantly dripping at the back of his throat, it was worth it now. Ottilie, Kaylee, and Hadleigh M. all booked consultations, not that they even needed them, but he ended up shooting himself in the face before he could fix their noses. In his note he apologized to the family he left behind and the new family he left in Santa Monica. He wrote that my nose had set him free. He had finally brought something beautiful into the world and now he could leave it. I still dream about that white tiger. I wonder who it became next.
The bathroom is a Roman vomitorium. Even though I know I know there were never actually vomitoriums in Ancient Rome. Hadleigh M. has her fingers down Kaylee’s throat. Ottilie is brushing the enamel right off her teeth. I am staring at the clumps of Nobu and Pinkberry swirling like dervishes in the toilet. We all want to be Dachau liberation day–skinny for spring break on Little Saint James. We need a vacation because LA is like Narnia now. Climate change is real. It’s always winter, but never Christmas. I celebrate Hanukkah anyway so I don’t really even care. When I grow up I’ll control the media or the banks, but first I’ll study comparative literature or new media or Nietzsche like my brother did at NYU. College will be fun, but I’ll miss my friends and our slumber party conversations and their fingers down my throat.
We are the most popular girls in school now. All the other girls are fat from the hormones in their chocolate milk or paralyzed by vaccine injuries or too busy saving up for their top surgeries to even care. The other most popular girls in school threw themselves off a bridge and into the dry LA River. They just couldn’t see the point in doing anything else. Ottilie, Kaylee, Hadleigh M., and I weren’t invited. We still had our baby fat and braces. We watched the most popular girls in school get power washed off the concrete. I even saw a few pigeons scavenge around for pieces of meat. We had a slumber party after the funeral and we knew that somewhere the dead girls were doing the same. That’s what death is, an eternal slumber party. If they’d have invited us, I know we would have gone. Thank God we were ugly ducklings. Now we are swans.
The night is dark like it always is. ISIS blew up the moon. The tide doesn’t know when to come in anymore. Surfers committed mass suicide. It was so gnarly. There was another sarin gas attack at Disneyland. This time Mickey had the masks ready for sale in every gift shop. It’s still the happiest place on earth. My parents had sex on Space Mountain. Nine months later I would be the second-worst thing to happen on September 11, 2001. One second, I was a martyr, piloting a plane right into a skyscraper, filled with love. Then, there with a puff, I was a beautiful baby girl being pulled out of a soap opera actress in Los Angeles. That’s a fun fact about me.
Here are some fun facts about my best friends. Hadleigh M. doesn’t have to run the mile in gym class because she has popcorn lung. All that cotton candy nicotine she vaped in middle school turned her lungs black like a coal miner’s. The Make-A-Wish Foundation gave her a wish, but she hasn’t spent it yet. Kaylee bought a heart attack gun on eBay when the CIA went out of business. It’s worked on every stepdad she’s had. Now that they’re gone we can have slumber parties at her place on weeknights. Ottilie got radicalized on a Vocaloid message board. She came to the homecoming dance with a bomb up her skirt. Someone spiked the punch and she got so drunk she forgot to detonate. It was pretty embarrassing, but we can all laugh about it now, and we’ll be laughing about it all night and all the other Friday nights that make up forever.
I’m cutting more lines with my debit card when the iPad mini starts singing some song from that Disney movie about the nonbinary prince(ss) and the talking poodle. It makes my heart beat too fast and bouncy like a possessed pogo stick. We can’t figure out how to turn it off without disturbing the heaping mound of crushed Vyvanse sitting on the screen. The song is teaching us a lesson about the end of the self and eternal return. Kaylee’s autistic brother is moaning from his room upstairs. He wants his iPad mini. We’ve stolen it to do our drugs, because all our phone screens are broken and trap the precious powder in their cracks. Kaylee’s brother is a buff Boo Radley sobbing like a baby on a flight to Tokyo. He wants to be near his song. But he can’t tell on us and he never will.
The undocumented night nurse has no idea why Kaylee’s brother is melting down. I can hear how much she needs a green card as she attempts to cover him with a weighted blanket. That blanket is only making him stronger, Kaylee says. He’s too strong. Only a stepdad can subdue him. He doesn’t want the weighted blanket. He wants the song. This Vyvanse has given me the power to telepathically communicate with your little brother, I tell Kaylee. He wants you to know that he lives in hell. We all do, she says as she scampers up the stairs with the iPad mini. She’s right. The song gets farther and farther away and so do the tormented telepathic waves. They turn into just ripples. I’m higher than that really high building in Dubai.
I look like Addison Rae or Loren Gray or リカちゃん. My face is beautiful. I am blonde. I am Jewish. My Bat Mitzvah was beautiful. My parents were so proud. My recitation brought the rabbi to tears. I think he could feel who I used to be before I was me with my old nose and big eyes. I gave my other life to God. Instead of seventy-two virgins, I got to be a girl from LA. At the party after the ceremony I came in flying on a trapeze. There were cupcakes that looked like circus tents and contortionists and a friendly chimpanzee named Travis. I held his hand and saw something I don’t want to talk about in his eyes. Travis is famous now because he ripped off a woman’s face and she had to get a face transplant and then a second face transplant because her body rejected the first. I think my body is beginning to reject this face that is mine for now. I might drink Windex. I might eat a Tide Pod. I might even just let time move as fast as it does and die an old lady with this same wrinkled face.
We think that Hadleigh M. will be the first of us to die. Her parents will join a class action lawsuit against single-use fruit-flavored nicotine products. They promise to still let us use her tree house as our smoke spot, but only weed allowed, no vapes. Hadleigh M. says I can have first dibs on her tracksuit collection. This makes Ottilie and Kaylee so mad that they start moaning in wordless yearning. Hadleigh M. explains that I will probably die next, so it’s only fair that I get to pick first. Everyone agrees that I will meet some tragic and sudden death, like Addison Rae did on that yacht. It’s such a coincidence that I look like her. I don’t want to end up like her. I guess there are worse ways to end up. I guess it’s a compliment.
We are in the basement speeding toward something as we laugh and laugh. It’s 3 a.m. now. The basement, paneled in wood and decorated with WWE memorabilia by so many stepdads, is now a medieval dungeon. I could be trapped down here forever. The night might never end. All this speed will get me nowhere. What if we’ve just been running in place? What if it’s one long big treadmill? What if it’s an eternal loop? A demon steals after me into my loneliest loneliness and speaks to me. I think I am crying a little bit. Everyone else is too busy practicing their one-handed cartwheels to see what I see, to feel eternity recurring.
The neon Budweiser sign begins to flicker faintly. I can smell some dead stepdad’s aftershave, a manly musk mingling with the burnt toast and Silly Putty smell of 5G. The little men of the foosball table begin to play a match. I wonder which dead stepdad will win. Hell can be anywhere, but usually it’s everywhere. Is that where we are speeding off to or are we all already there? I want to tell the dead stepdads that I like the way they paneled the basement, but Kaylee is chanting something in Latin and they are gone again and I am doing a one-handed cartwheel as fast as I can.
Now it’s time for us to play truth or dare. I say, “Truth. For everyone. What if I told you this life we’re living right now and have lived, what if we have to do it again and again and all over again forever? Every , every ? And there will be nothing new in it, literally, and we’re all specks in the hourglass of eternity and it’ll never stop turning?”
Ottilie asks me what an hourglass is. I show her the emoji, .
None of them throw themselves down on the carpet or gnash their Invisalign teeth or curse me, who spoke thus. We have all experienced a tremendous moment and so we can answer: “Then I would say, you are a god and never have I ever heard anything more divine.”
All the cities are on fire like the Amazon was when the Amazon still was. I’m on TikTok watching them burn. I order communion wafers on Amazon Prime. I have been trying to get better. I do primal movements and meditate. I reach every time. I get ketamine infusions for my oppositional defiant disorder. They make me feel like a pony who broke her leg, healing like a miracle. I’m just like Jeffrey Epstein. I didn’t kill myself. The slumber party is over. The sun is rising. It happens every morning, still. This is just one of many Saturdays. The sun is up again.
