“With all due respect, Rebecca Amari,” he said in a tone that made me wonder whether I’d invented that name, “why would I let you co-opt my ideas into some phony academic bullshit, just so you can get tenure?”
I explained that I wasn’t at the point of seeking tenure, just my PhD and hopefully a teaching job somewhere, and assured Alfred of my intention to acknowledge his story as his own even as I worked to codify and contextualize the phenomena he described.
“No offense, but I don’t really need you for that,” he said.
“With all due respect,” I replied, “I think you do.”
“Why?”
“Because the only thing you’ve managed to produce so far is an unwatchable film about geese,” I said. “No offense.”
He put down the tool he was holding and tilted his head at me. “Have we met before?” he asked. “You seem familiar.”
“We both have freckles,” I said, and got a first genuine smile out of him. “I’m guessing I remind you of yourself. Plus, I’m the only person in the world as obsessed with authenticity as you are.”
It was a year before I heard from him.
* * *
I already knew, from Alfred’s father, that he had embarked on a project even more alienating and extreme than his middle school paper-bag-wearing had been. Its impetus dated to a morning in late summer when Alfred walked his dog, an adopted dachshund named Maple Tree, to a local elementary school on enrollment day. He informed two women who worked for the Department of Education that he wished to enroll Maple Tree in pre-K, then settled in to relish their bewilderment.
“She’s really smart,” he said. “She just learns differently.”
“She doesn’t have language, but she understands everything.”
“She’ll sit quietly and listen as long as you throw her one of these treats every few minutes.”
The ladies, whose curved fingernails had been lavished with the nuanced paintwork normally reserved for museum-quality surfboards, listened with barely repressed hilarity. “You want to enroll your dog in school,” one intoned, her mouth twitching.
“What happens when the other children want to bring their pets to school?” the other rejoined.
“Is she potty-trained? We can’t have anyone weeing on the floor…”
“Does she know her letters or her numbers?”
Alfred noticed the ladies exchanging crafty glances and began to smell a performative rat. After surreptitiously applying lipstick, one said, “All right, honey, we’ve got a whole line of people waiting outside. Time to break through that fourth wall.”
“What are you talking about?” Alfred asked, clutching Maple Tree to his chest.
“Is it on you, the satchel, or the dog?”
“I hope it’s the dog,” said the first. “I’ve been giving that puppy my best side.”
At the discovery that Alfred had no hidden camera with him to record the absurd encounter—that they’d just wasted twenty minutes humoring a dolt, with no prospect of YouTube fame—the ladies tossed him out on his ass.
Thus Alfred’s awakening to our Self-Surveillance Era.
Back in his room on West Twenty-eighth, he gazed despairingly into Maple Tree’s amber eyes. In this new world, rascally tricks were no longer enough to produce authentic responses; authenticity required violent unmasking, like worms writhing at the hasty removal of their rock. He needed to push people past their breaking points. Even Mr. Quiet Supremacy had a breaking point, as Alfred learned when his oldest brother called him at SUNY New Paltz in a drunken, anguished state during Alfred’s senior year—the first time he’d ever heard Miles sound hammered.