Dirty Boulevard, page 12
But these days, she mostly preferred Facefuck to her other unlikely sources of anonymous comfort food, certainly an electrical fix over a chemical one. On her tiny, scratched screen, people befriended, hooked up, broke up, “unfriended” each other or whatever they called it, but always she remained. It was weird and fascinating, and recently she’d even dropped down a whole level deeper, when a friend’s ex-husband got engaged to someone new, but she still thought Eva’s face was funny enough to add her, too…and then they broke up and blocked each other, like couples usually do. But just like that song, she was still there. Sometimes she would read a story about someone being killed with a phone or having their face bashed in by a computer keyboard, and she would understand completely, as she couldn’t imagine anyone listening to an insufferable social-media play-by-play (like this one!) of her new addiction without resorting to violence.
“Stay tuned,” she told her brother. “Because one day soon I will be Facebook friends with a friend’s ex’s ex’s ex! Whom I’ve never met. This is inevitable. But what will I win? Well, I’ll tell you what I’ll win. By my estimate, at this moment, I’m about a year away from gathering a list of a thousand people I’ve never met in real life. That’s gotta be first place in Hell, right?”
He had no idea what she was talking about. But it didn’t matter. If the internet kept her away from the pills, and a job kept her away from school, then she needed to get back to work to keep herself away from the internet. And when she wasn’t wasting time at the Last Video Store on Earth, she could just be a lab rat within biking distance of the school she was ducking, and another hour away from her father’s house she was still avoiding, but maintain that perfect side job renting out old movies when school was in session. That’s why she liked the video store. Nothing too complicated, but something to keep her brother off her ass, and with the added bonus of a built-in expiration date, just like herself.
“Shit, is Lou Reed really dead?” her brother asked over her shoulder, his hand holding the bowl of milk so long it sagged and threatened to spill.
Eva routinely received emails and phone calls asking her to come to Facebook’s new Midwest branch campus for a “consumer experiment.” They’d noticed her increased usage and “interesting connections,” and, maybe, the Palo Alto mailing address she’d never bothered to update? Initially, she was excited. She didn’t realize that squatting so close to their HQ in her other brother’s Northern California shithole and ducking school like she owned it money would put her in on the radar of such state-of-the-art research. But it was tech-bro central out there, with start-ups growing on the trees, then, more often than not, rotting on the ground where they fell.
So she called back someone named “Stacy” (with an “I”) to say, “Hell, yeah! I’m on my phone all day, so it actually makes sense to try and monetize this fiasco. We’ll be rich!” But Stacy With An Eye said, “Whoa, let’s slow down a bit” and offered her a five-hundred-dollar Amazon gift card for “no more than three hours” of her time. Sold. That was almost doctor’s wages. Or at least chef’s wages. Actually, she would have done it for a sandwich. But not any sandwich. A nice sandwich, like the ones they cut diagonal.
She rode her brother’s bike up to the address they emailed her, where a sprawling candy-colored metropolis turned out to be hidden in plain sight. On the outside, it was an unassuming industrial park with what Eva decided was a sort of “after the quake” architecture style going on. She’d ridden past it dozens of times but for some reason never noticed the trademark giant “thumbs up” billboard out front. Probably because vandals had turned it upside-down.
Once past the guard tower, she showed her ID to no less than three lines of defense, alternating pockets of private and commercial security contractors at ominous alters and podiums, and they scanned every inch of her, but they must not have detected all the scars under her sleeves or the roadmap of bad ideas crisscrossing her brain or all those red flags that would have told anyone paying the slightest attention that she was the kind of person who was gonna fuck this up like everything else in her life, and she got the giggles striving through their fluorescent pink revolving door like it wasn’t some huge mistake.
In the elevator, she made the mistake of stepping in front of a smartly-dressed schoolmarm type and soaked up her impatient sigh like it was mother’s milk. Eva thought about the thousands of miles she’d traveled in the past couple years, and though it wasn’t a scientific poll by any means, everyone who she ever noticed complaining about people not doing their jobs or people cutting in line or worried people were getting away with something that they shouldn’t be doing were one hundred percent old white women. Except maybe for Jerry.
Just make these bitches cops and be done with it.
The elevator hummed along a lot longer than seemed possible, as she’d only noticed three stories tops from the outside. She checked the buttons on the panel, and it was traveling only a floor every five minutes. The pinch-faced scold left as young men with backpacks filed on in and crowded her into the back corner and immediately three of these dudes started an elaborate conversation about how the Pork Jowl sandwich was invented, as she started to get ants in her pants for a fast escape and even miss the disapproving stare of an old white woman.
“Okay, this is how it went down. Someone must have said, ‘Hey, Bob, I feel like a sandwich.’ And the other guy said, ‘Well, Harry, you don’t look like a sandwich!’ and then he goes, ‘Shut the fuck up, Bob, I’m kinda hungry,’ and he goes, ‘So, how about another pork chop?’ And the other guy says, ‘Nah, I want to eat the fucking face.’ ‘Wait, what?’ ‘You heard me. Bring me that fucking pig’s face.’ ‘But why, dude? Plenty of other parts left that are still edible.’ ‘Don’t care.’ ‘You’re serious.’ And so on.”
The kid performing this one-man play was making sure he went face to face with everyone in the elevator, clearly proud of his story, while Eva studied the hole in her sneaker.
“‘I’m telling you, I want a fucking sandwich to look at me while I’m eating it! Bring me the goddamn face right now.’”
She could feel him staring at her, and she finally looked up to make it stop.
“Lunch sounds so threatening all the sudden,” she said.
“Bring me a fucking face for my sandwich,” he said to her, deadly serious.
“It’s like a sandwich isn’t fun anymore, bro,” she said, and the other guys laughed.
Great, I’m in the gang.
“It was never meant to be fun,” he shrugged, and, mercifully, the elevator doors opened.
In the lobby, things didn’t get much better. There was a kid playing some sad song on a baby grand piano with a sign someone had tape on his back that read, “Until His Lost Love Comes Back To Him.”
He looked like he’d been there for days; a week’s worth of stubble, loose necktie, head down like he was ready to pass out. Eva wondered how many people found conspicuous public displays like his romantic, thinking the sign on his back should have read: “Local Woman’s Choice To Ditch Loony Pianist Vindicated.”
Eva smiled, thinking about the time Jerry sort of did something similar. Not playing a marathon piano session (gross), but more reasonably swearing he was going to watch Darkman every day by himself until she relented and joined him. For all she knew, he was still watching it.
She leaned on the piano, trying to get the young man’s attention, to ask if this was some sort of experiment, then decided she would likely be his new subject if she engaged with him, and that’s when a handler put a pink, gloved hand on her shoulder and a young woman with a pink streak in her hair and a matching pink pantsuit led her by the arm through some double doors.
At the final checkpoint, she was asked to leave her trusty clamshell in a box of phones at a long, translucent desk. Through the plastic drawers, she noticed they were all flip phones stashed in there, too, each as outdated as her own. Then she was led to a seat in the last waiting room, surrounded by a rainbow of exposed brick and gleaming ductwork, and the girl in the pink pantsuit, now grinning like a shark, offered her a granola bar and some fancy water in a square bottle. This turned out to be Stacy With An Eye, and she told Eva she’d be taking her “inside” momentarily.
We’re not inside?
In the meantime, she looked around at the recycled furniture and the kiosk of healthy snacks, noticing along the wall behind her what was clearly a two-way mirror with just a hint of officious shadows bustling behind it. The mirror was bigger than the ones she’d once tried to stare through at police stations.
Okay, maybe I do belong here after all.
When Eva was led back to the final white room, she was asked to raise her shirt, and she thought about all the movies where someone is forced to expose their bellies to prove they’re not wearing a wire.
“Come on, you know, those scenes in the movies?” Eva goaded her handler. “I always wondered why they don’t ever reveal a huge Snoopy Flying Ace tattoo. Feels like a big missed opportunity.”
Stacy With An Eye said nothing as Eva flashed her bare stomach, riddled with goose bumps, then her the small of her back which was brushed professionally as her jeans pockets were squeezed by a pink-gloved hand.
“For a second you thought I was wearing one, didn’t you?” she laughed. Stacy With An Eye shrugged, smile impossibly wider.
“How was the elevator?” she asked.
“Was that part of the test?” Eva asked.
“No, but my question might be.”
“Slow elevators do seem like ripe soil for cultivating sociological experiments,” Eva said, eager to sound smart and not forfeit that gift card reward. “My brothers and I used to play a game where we gave everyone else on an elevator a rating, from one to ten. ‘Who you’d not want to be stuck with if it stopped’ being ten, and the worst, of course.”
“How many brothers do you have?”
“Technically, just the one, Alexander,” Eva said as she tucked her shirt in. “But you know how it is with twins. Sometimes there are two of them.”
Back when she first started undergrad, Eva did her first research experiment for a cool grand and only a week’s worth of her time. She came from a nutty, sleepwalky family, and her brothers had routinely made a bit of money doing sleep studies, so she’d tried to hop on that gravy train.
When the three of them were little, her oldest brother, Alec, used to run around the house in a dead sleep and yell profanity and even ended up outside some nights, and her youngest brother, Alex, he mostly stayed in bed and just ground her teeth in between long speeches of alien gibberish. But with Eva, she never sleepwalked or sleeptalked, though occasionally she did get that terrifying sleep paralysis and sometimes a nightmare shadow dude running across her ceiling that she was seventy-five percent sure wasn’t one of the twins. Since she’d moved in with Alec, she discovered him also doing Alex’s weird extraterrestrial sleepspeak on occasion, and according to Alec’s sometime girlfriend, Sally, Eva would start sleeptalking right along with him, just like “a couple of Furbys having a conversation,” she told them. So Eva guessed she’d been infected all along, when you got at least two of them back together anyway. But no one caught this on tape, and her college research study was inconclusive, besides hinting, for no good reason at all, that she may have been adopted. Later, they tried to make her ride a stationary bike while sleeping, and she fell off and cracked her head and ended up with five stitches in her scalp. It wasn’t a peer-reviewed study.
In the white room, Eva started to get drowsy, sitting up straighter at the sound of a phone ringing through the walls. All her exes had their own ringtones, based on the names she used at the time. Bob knew her as “Aimee,” so his was Pure Prairie League’s one-hit-wonder. Jack knew her as “Maggie,” so it was Rod Stewart telling her to “wake up” when he called. Steve knew her as “Angie,” so his was a Rolling Stones ringtone, and so on. It really helped her keep her identities straight. It was the song “Angie” she heard ringing in the distance.
She stared at her reflection in the long mirror. Sometimes, when she had trouble keeping her eyes open, she had an urge to bash her own face in, which was a horrendous enough impulse. Then, even worse, she’d take some solace in the fact that someone would eventually do her the favor. This was residual shame and fear of doing things she wouldn’t remember doing, whether it was under the influence of sleep or anything else.
After fifteen more minutes in the room, long enough to realize the wallpaper was really more yellow than white, she noticed the heat rising and grew restless enough to check the limits of her dreary “officecore” surroundings. She stood up, did some initial yoga stretches, then started walking in ever-widening laps.
Give them something else to study.
On the wall behind her was a huge picture of a satellite high above the Earth. The Facebook satellite, she guessed, though it didn’t have the thumbs-up painted on the hull, but instead sported one of their new icons, a heart. Down a long hall and around the corners, she caught glimpses of what she assumed were other “consumer experiments” behind a Candyland variety of Let’s Make a Deal doors. And when one of these doors swung wider than the rest, she saw a regiment of exercise bikes, mounted by young men and women, college age, presumably awake, but like her handler, or the fussy woman on the elevator, dressed too nice to be working, let alone working out so hard, all peddling like maniacs in front of another massive mirror behind them. She spotted some poor bastard in a three-piece suit handing out bananas, and another poor bastard actually peeling them in between wiping the sweat off the bicycle seats.
Hell has got everything except a climbing wall!
A few short minutes later, after approximately ten more of her laps, Stacy With An Eye came back in to tell her that her “session” had been cancelled, but that she’d be paid regardless.
“Wait a second.” Eva put her hand on the door to slow her exit. “Can I ask you a quick question?”
“Sure,” she said, insanely chipper.
“Did you see that Lou Reed died today?”
“I think I heard something about that,” she said, sounding skeptical.
“But he didn’t die today. So why are celebrity deaths recycled on your feed? Do you guys do that on purpose?”
Stacy With An Eye seemed surprised and looked around like she was checking for eavesdroppers, as if the whole campus wasn’t obviously wired for sight and sound.
“With Halloween this weekend, there’s gonna be ‘Halloween Parade’ lyrics shared left and right, am I right?” Eva said, not sure what she was getting at.
“I can’t answer that, ma’am.”
“Mm-hmm,” Eva said, trying to sound suspicious as she let the door open all the way. “You know, he sort of predicted your creepy ‘legacy’ feature, where your Facebook page goes on even after your death? Uncle Lou once said, ‘It’s depressing when you’re still around and your albums are out of print’…”
“Interesting.”
“Stacy With An Eye…” Eva muttered.
“You can just call me Staci,” she said, and Eva blushed. She didn’t realize she’d said that out loud.
“Staci, how do you keep track of so many deaths?”
Staci held up a finger and waved her in close to her face. Eva leaned in, noted that the woman’s skin was flawless and she smelled like vitamins.
“Actually, we only promote the deaths of celebrities that we are responsible for,” she said ominously, and Eva’s army of goose bumps were back.
“Wait, what?”
“What?” Staci laughed steering Eva’s shoulders toward the first of five exits. Eva opened her mouth to ask more questions, but a burly government-issued dude in a tight black T-shirt was holding open the next door and giving her the serious “time to go” head tilt. Staci’s grin was almost touching at the corners as she slapped the Amazon gift card into Eva’s palm and clapped her on the back to send her on her way. Eva was hustled back through the never-ending grins and gauntlet of checkpoints and podiums hovering above and below mirrored sunglasses and gym-muscles as a final purple door grew larger in the distance.
As the last door loomed, Eva thought about how she wished she could have told someone there how Lou Reed also said in the same interview that CDs were a horrible invention that made voices sound as if they were filtered through shrill, electronic bird shit, and how that had to have been the best description of social media she’d ever heard. Then she felt bad for thinking this, not for biting that hand that fed her gift cards per se, but more for drawing her own attention back to her online compulsions. Then she was outside in the sunshine much faster than it took to go in, and she was shaking off the experience as she pedaled headed home.
It wasn’t until she was back at her brother’s house, and realized that he’d accidentally locked her out of the house that she saw she was holding someone else’s phone.
