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“Myspace was an entire life,” she nearly wept at a bookstore in Chicago, and the whole audience conjured up the image of a man in a white T-shirt grinning over his shoulder, and a private music began to autoplay for each of them. “And it is lost, lost, lost, lost!”
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In Toronto, the man she talked to so often in the portal began to speak out of his actual mouth, which produced the modern tone incarnate. “I had been putting my balls online for a while. I’d post regular pictures of my garage or kitchen or whatever, with increasing amounts of ball in the background.”
She thought, the first necessity for this conversation is that I do not ask Why would you do that. I take it for granted that at some point in the course of human events you will see a reason to put increasing amounts of your balls online. She glanced down at his feet; he was wearing cowboy boots, to be funny, as he sometimes posted pictures of himself in a ten-gallon hat, with the caption “Cow Boy.” He was one of the secret architects of the new shared sense of humor; the voice she was hearing in this place, intimate, had spread like a regional fire across the globe.
“And one night I went to a bar where a bunch of posters were meeting up,” he went on. “And a dude walked up to me and handed me a business card that had I’ve seen your balls printed on it. He didn’t say a single word. Then next to him, right on cue, his friend puked into a trash can.
“And I thought to myself, nothing will ever be funny in this way again.”
The food came and it was disgusting, because they had ordered the worst thing on the menu on purpose, to be funny. “You could write it, you know,” she said, leaning forward into a wind. “Someone could write it. But it would have to be like Jane Austen—what someone said at breakfast over cold mutton, a fatal quadrille error, the rising of fine hackles in the drawing room.” Pale violent shadings of tone, a hair being split down to the DNA. A social novel.
She looked at his profile and saw him as the blazing endpoint of a civilization: ships on the Atlantic, the seasickness of ancestors over a churning green, the fact that he looked just like his son, whose pictures he sometimes posted. And if someone doesn’t, she thought, how will we preserve it for the future—how it felt, to be a man around the turn of the century posting increasing amounts of his balls online?
On the way out, in a haze, she remembered she had seen some of those pictures herself, a long time ago and between glimpses of other things. But the moment to mention it had passed. He lit a cigarette, and as she took one from him, to be funny, she said, “They’re getting it all wrong, aren’t they? Already when people are writing about it, they’re getting it all wrong.”
“Oh yes,” he said, exhaling gently through his nostrils to be funny, in a tone that meant she was getting it wrong too.
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Whole subcultures sprang up on boards where people met to talk about their candida overgrowth. You stumbled across it late one night when you were idly typing in searches: why am I tired all the time, why can I no longer memorize a seven-minute monologue, why is my tongue less pink than it was when I was a child. （There were only two questions at three in the morning, and they were Am I dying and Does anybody really love me.） You found the candida overgrowth board, glowing its welcome along the highway of sleeplessness, and stepped through the swinging doors, which immediately shut fast behind you. You took up the candida overgrowth language; what began as the most elastic and snappable verbal play soon emerged in jargon, and then in doctrine, and then in dogma. Your behavior was subtly modified against humiliations, chastisements, censures you might receive on the candida overgrowth board. You anticipated arguments against you and played them out in the shower while you were soaping your hair, whose full growth potential and luster had been stymied by candida. If a wizard of charisma appeared on the candida overgrowth boards, one who spurred the other members to greater and greater heights of rhetoric and answerback and improvisation, the candida board might conceivably birth a new vernacular—one that the rest of the world at first didn’t understand, and which was then seen to be the universal language.
Also, you might leave your husband for that guy.
The next morning your eyes were gritty and your tongue even less pink than it had been before, and the people who filtered past you at your job were less real than the vivid scroll of the board dedicated to the discussion of candida overgrowth, which didn’t even exist.