The video started quietly, with a forest in the Southeast where metal dishes hung from wire stands and from some of the trees. There were bowling balls and bottles on wooden poles, and you could match, if you wanted, each shadow to the leaf that caused it. Eventually, an old man stepped into the picture, facing away from the camera, and shot a single round into one of the dishes, causing it to spin and make a high-pitched sound. He played a country song on his phone and continued shooting the dishes and pins, sometimes to the beat and sometimes not, so it was a little hard to tell what purpose the music served, other than the pleasure of listening to it. The gun, an express handgun and probably a Glock derivative, fired plainly. When he was finished, he turned to the camera and talked about maintenance on the range and the renovations he was planning with his sons. He said he didn’t like to shoot when it was cold, but that he made sure to get out in the winter, at least on weekends. While he spoke, he sometimes played with the slide, a nervous habit which undermined his presentation of efficacy. He seemed avuncular, and one imagined that his sons really existed, and that they were handsome.
Megan messaged Gary, who sent her the video, and told him he’d found a good guy, then they riffed for a while. Imitating the old man, she said it was important to shoot in the winter, especially if you didn’t feel like it. Gary, also in-character, said he loved his wife, but that she tested him, which he figured was natural. Really, he said, he was only himself on the range with his sons. Megan said that the other day, her wife saw an installment in the mail for her four-wheeler and started packing a bag for her sister-in-law’s. She got her sons to the range, and “it was like I was a young man again. Like I was back in the service.” Megan said, as if any of this was true, that a wife was an investment, and that it was a long life to spend alone. Gary used the laugh-react and asked when she had to leave for her date, “with Cameron.” She rolled over in bed and told him she had a few hours. She thought Gary was probably in bed, too, or maybe in a gross chair.
“When are you getting a girlfriend?” said Megan. Gary told her, with some irony, that he had one. What he meant was he had Sofia, a twenty-two-year-old from the Philippines who he’d met just once in-person. Gary messaged Sofia daily, but he would never mention her in conversation, except with Megan; he was thirty-eight, and he expected to die alone. Megan wasn’t sure he was wrong, but she told him not to worry, that many women found helplessness sexy. The other day, she watched a YouTube video about hikikomori in Japan and the American bloggers who obsessed over them. Their posts, on personal websites and sometimes Instagram, would always open with an image of a twenty-year-old Japanese guy using his laptop or eating a small meal in an apartment full of garbage, then launch into an erotic lament about the torment of unemployment and squalor. Megan thought it was sweet that, even if they didn’t want to help, they cared, probably even in a self-conscious way.
“And then they became boyfriend-and-girlfriend,” said Gary. Megan said they might have, if they lived closer to each other and spoke the same language. He disagreed.
“Maybe it started on the outside. Sometimes, the shit breaks you.” When he was her age, and unemployed, Gary felt the world had rejected him. He would walk around the mall or the streets he grew up on, and everything would seem cruel and disposable. Once an avowed misanthrope, he grew to blame himself. He got a job at a chain bookstore and moved to the city, and any impression of uniformity dissolved in the decades that followed. People weren’t cruel or vindictive, they were normal and different from each other. Everything the world felt empty of had been there all along; it was only really over for him. Megan sent a laughing emoji and told him not to be a pussy, that people could obviously be happy sometimes. She said he was scared of nothing.
Megan got ready for her date while, somewhere on the same coast, Gary drafted a YouTube comment. She wore socks into the bathroom because she never swept or cleaned at all, then took them off so she could grip the floor while she peed. The ground felt cold and gritty, but the air was warmed by the exposed, scalding pipes on the wall in front of her. She washed the crumbs off her feet when she got in the shower, then put her back to the water, then her stomach, then let it run from her scalp to the basin in a long and broken flow. Megan flushed hairs off the sides of the tub with the water that ran off her fingertips and stood, too warm now, directly under the nozzle. Three years ago, she wore flip-flops to the showers in her dorm, which were cleaned professionally. Now she’d grown up, or at least adjusted to herself.
There was a tempered-glass window in the shower with a sill that Megan used to store her shampoo. It looked out onto a brick wall, and when she opened it, she caught a few measures of birdsong, unheard-of in the neighborhood. It sounded like the ambient noise at a themed restaurant. Megan listened for a while, then listened to the place where the sound used to be while she stepped out and got dressed. She grabbed a sweater and pants from her closet without really looking and stood in front of the mirror, then ate a pudding cup in front of the fridge. There was some water in the filter, so she poured herself a glass and refilled the pitcher. Megan vaped in her kitchen, then sat on her balcony, blowing smoke. Across the way, she could see through the tempered glass and into peoples’ showers, which were empty but suggestive. Her mouth was coated in menthol flavoring, so she finished the water and returned to bed.
Back on Discord, Gary was trying to share his screen. He was commenting as Jonah Hinkle, a persona he’d developed responding to gun videos, and his draft focused on the home security shortcomings of the old man’s gun range. Hinkle was a self-defense expert and Krav Maga practitioner who, molded by time on both sides of law enforcement, had a killer’s insight into weaknesses and blind spots. He could tell, for instance, that the man from the video thought survival was about shooting well. In real life, people played dirty: you could be a great shot, but if you had a family, there was leverage. Hinkle knew what bad men could do, and he didn’t think people were scared enough. He almost wanted to drive to the old man’s range and record his own video, one where he’d trace the insecurities of his defenses in a simulated robbery scenario, ending with a real-time entry and confrontation. “We could call it a collab.”
Megan thought he should delete the last line, but that it was funny. Gary agreed it was funny and asked why she was going on a date with Cameron. “People post about it. Self-respect and not texting exes.” Megan said they were just getting drinks, that he had reached out to her. It had only been five years, but she’d forgotten most of their relationship, and it would be interesting to see what surfaced when they met up. She told Gary it was something to do, which was true, and he understood. He told her that, at a certain point, you started looking at all the buttons you didn’t press. There were near-misses, aborted confrontations, times he wished he’d had more to drink. He said at her age, it seemed like people were trying to hold you back, but they were really giving you somewhere to go, that life without friction was heat death. Megan thanked him and said she might actually fuck Cameron now, then Gary sent a GIF from the movie Gravity where Sandra Bullock hurtles, untouched, into space.
On the way to her date, Megan listened to a rap song about suicide and tried to remember Cameron. He was a college boyfriend: eager and sincere, with a capacity for cruelty that he would acknowledge when it arose, but which existed outside his self-image. Over the first few months, she learned he was a more conventional person than his profile made him seem, someone who didn’t have interests as much as inclinations. Their relationship felt inevitable, at least toward the beginning, a thing in itself, which contrived their behavior so it could be born. Only she couldn’t remember Cameron, the boy. He felt like a hole with a shape but nothing in it. Megan stared at the other people on the train and thought what he might have looked like, whether he had brown hair.
When she got to the restaurant, he stood up to give her a hug, and she accepted. He did have brown hair, with big eyes and thin lips and an open, amiable face that she recognized like a sentimental, misplaced object. Megan told Cameron he looked older, and he said she looked good. They got drinks and seasoned fries with mayonnaise for dipping, and she spoke for some time about working in UX design and living in the city. Cameron listened closely, calmly, while crumbling his coaster with his index finger and thumb. He asked how she ended up in Boston, so she told him. He said New York was more significant, but not better, and she laughed. Cameron was here visiting friends, but he was very glad they got to meet up, especially because Kyle, who he was staying with, was going to a reading that night in Cambridge. “This is more my scene,” he said with a blank gesture.
Megan asked how he was doing and he said he was doing well, that he was getting a hang of his milieu. When he first met his friends, he thought they were tedious and needlessly contentious, but the real difference was how they handled embarrassment. They were truly social; they were all invested in each other, and knew what they couldn’t say, or couldn’t say and get a response. If one of them started an argument where they were obviously wrong or got offended without good reason, that was taken as “being crazy,” and forgiven immediately. They wanted to get a reaction, but they also wanted to stay in play. Cameron said it was freeing, at first, to say whatever he wanted, but that it got boring and awkward, and that now he felt weird about speech in general. He said he wasn’t sure talking did anything, then he grinned and added that it was worth it with good people.
Megan got him high for the first time a few weeks into their relationship and showed him SpongeBob edits on her laptop, edits which reduced the dialogue to a senseless, arrhythmic slurry and found new patterns, even very funny ones, in the disorder. Characters and scenarios were remixed, but the grammar was new, either coming into being or complete and unknown. He remembered laughing and squeezing her shoulder, but being in awe. Stoned in her bed, it seemed like something that used to be important had become impossible, like everything on the table from that moment forward would have been inconceivable an hour before. Megan snapped a fry in the mayonnaise and tried to remember if that was the night she lost her virginity. Cameron said it was the last time he could remember feeling a qualitative shift. “Novelty,” he said. “What can you do after YouTube Poop?”
She chewed thoughtfully and considered his question, then told him he didn’t have to do anything, that creators were aware of the problem and working on a solution. Cameron took her comment ironically, then touched her hand and asked what she was watching. “Just videos,” she said. “Grandpas at the shooting range, that sort of thing.” He laughed a little loudly, like she’d made a joke, then smiled while he sipped his beer. Megan remembered something about Cameron: he wasn’t self-competent. He was never needy, and he had friends, but he relied on her to show him things. Once, during a fight, she said he was only with her so she’d tell him what to do. She asked a waitress for more water and, turning to Cameron, said he was right about YouTube Poop, that art couldn’t happen anymore, so all they had was life.
From there, the conversation cooled. Cameron’s eyes, once cloying, sat water-tight across the table. He and Megan shared observations about working from home and watching television, and sometimes he’d take a long pull from his beer and scan the bar like he was avoiding something. Megan remembered being nineteen and feeling drawn into his life. One night, when he was drunk, she told him she loved him, and it didn’t take anything out of her. Now, watching things break down, she didn’t think she could bother. The two of them were separate, inert objects. She talked about the different kinds of engineers, and when he replied, she imagined what it would take for her to reach out to an ex. Eventually, Cameron gave her an earnest, scornful grin and said he had to piss.
Megan checked her phone while Cameron used the bathroom. She had a notification from Gary, which she didn’t open. She looked at herself in the camera app then finished her drink and ordered another. The bar was playing a sentimental piano piece, and Megan felt touched by it. She thought it felt credible, or that she did. Behind her, a young woman asked her boyfriend if he knew that his dreams were trips to other realities, and he said no. Megan noticed the table was set with satisfying, industrial-looking forks, so she took one out of its napkin and used it on the fries, spearing a handful then picking them off with her teeth. She opened her phone and saw a picture from Gary. It was a photo of his mouth, spread open and overflowing with pills, accompanied by a text about killing himself.
Cameron smiled when he sat down and told her he just had a memory. One afternoon the summer they dated, she finished a video game, and they went kayaking near his parents’ house. There was a lake on his development with a roped-off swimming area and some retirees on a pontoon, plus a couple mid-sized sailboats. He remembered that, on a few occasions, she put her oar on her lap and stared at a small mountain some miles away. In those moments, he thought she looked assured, like she only ever did what she was already going to do. At one point, when she was staring at the mountain, he asked what she was thinking about, and she said she couldn’t tell him. “I remember it wasn’t nothing. You didn’t say you were just looking at the mountain,” he said. “You said you couldn’t tell me.” Cameron asked her to tell him what she was thinking that afternoon, and she asked if he had a car.
Megan showed Cameron the picture and said that Gary lived an hour away, that she couldn’t get there because the train didn’t go far enough. He spread his eyes and said he wanted to help. Megan thought he handled himself confidently, closing out their tab and fetching his sedan while she vaped out front. Inside the car, things were a little dingy but basically neat. He played somber music, more likely out of habit than to match the situation, and drove with purpose. Sometimes he’d adjust the heat, sometimes the music, and sometimes he changed lanes without a clear objective. He offered Megan a piece of gum, and she accepted. She called Gary every few minutes and otherwise went on her phone, where she read articles about automation in UX writing. The comments were alternately flippant and apocalyptic; Megan hit ‘like’ on some of them.
At one point, a song ended with a long note, and she felt the belonging she used to feel in his car, or at least an iteration on it. She wouldn’t put her feet on the dashboard or ask to play her music, but she might dig around for tissues without saying anything first. She asked Cameron if he remembered something, and he said he did. An emo song was playing, and it climaxed in a yelp: I’m not mad, I’m not mad, I’m not mad, it doesn’t fucking matter. It sounded desperate, like once you played it, the performance voided the song, so both the band and the listener needed to move on. She told Cameron that the song was good, and he seemed flattered. His phone was secured to the dashboard so he could use it for navigation, and every once in a while, he would ignore a call from someone named Sophie. He asked if this was the first time Gary did something like this, and she said yes, that it was the first time he’d done so seriously.
Cameron took Gary’s exit, and they drove by some one-story plazas and office parks. They passed chain restaurants with and without drive thrus, sometimes sharing a lot with a dentist’s office or a massage spa but always with an emphasis on parking. Stopped at a traffic light, Megan watched someone cross the side-view mirror. He was going into a Michaels, and though he looked lonely, she took some pleasure in his image, or its place in the composition. The store loomed above him, but huddled as he was, his passage from left to right was almost impressive. She would have liked to see him finish his circuit and walk out of frame, but the light turned green and his reflection shrunk back until she got distracted. Cameron asked to hit her vape, so she let him, and he coughed, then took a sip of water.
They crossed an overpass with tarps on the railings, so the headlights shone through the plastic, and the poles cast their shadows on the insides. After a few miles of residential streets, they pulled up to the address Megan had saved. The place was built ranch-style, with two overlapping eaves in the middle and an extension on one side that bulged off the facade and into the back yard. It looked like two twin beds pressed together perpendicularly, head-to-foot. Cameron said that he didn’t picture Gary as a homeowner, and Megan agreed. When they knocked on the door, a small boy answered wearing pajamas and slippers with three clawed toes on each foot. He asked who they were and they apologized, then explained that they were looking for Gary. The boy, who had trouble pronouncing the ‘R’ in Gary, backed out of the threshold and called out to his parents, asking what was going on.
“Gary’s friends?” said a man with big eyes. He leaned his hand and forearm on the threshold and joked that he didn’t think his brother did playdates anymore. His wife stood one room over, in the kitchen, making a spread-based sandwich and shaking her head. She said something about her son and mentioned that he had school tomorrow. Megan asked when he’d last spoken to Gary, then he rolled his eyes and asked his wife. She said it was lunch, and he repeated back to them: It was probably lunch. Megan told him that his brother sent her some disturbing messages that evening, that she was there to check on him. He told her that Gary liked dark stuff, but his face twitched, and when she asked if he’d go and knock, he agreed. Cameron patted her on the shoulder, and she stepped inside.
They took a seat on the couch while the man checked on Gary. His son ate Oreos on the floor and watched a cartoon with the same cast as one Megan had loved as a child, but with a completely different tone. One of the characters asked if the other lost his butt, and the boy laughed. He looked over his shoulder to see if they were laughing, and Cameron chuckled, as if to be generous. Gary’s brother knocked three times on the door, then said, “Gary.” The kid asked Megan if his uncle was funny, and she said he was. He blinked and wiped some gunk from his lip, then agreed. The brother knocked again, harder this time, and told Gary that he had to open up, that there were people here to see him, that they were scared. He said he was coming in, then there was a loud sound, and he told Megan it was “all her.”
She and Cameron entered the room at a casual pace and took a moment to look around. It was dirty and played out, with paper goods and wrappers filling the space around the furniture. There was a desk in one corner with an office chair whose tracks dug into the rug and which appeared to be another place to put dirty clothes. In the other corner, a lamp hung over a recliner, and on top of his dresser, there was a signed basketball. Gary was in the bed, moaning, and he kicked an empty liquor bottle off the bedside table. Megan took a knee on the floor and shook him, asking how much he took and how long ago he took it, but he only moaned. She sat on the edge and turned him over, then looked into his eyes and repeated herself. “How much did you take?” He drooled a little then sat up and said something. She said what, and he said, “fucking…”
Cameron called her over to the desk, where he’d found a pile of white pills that were covered in spit but basically intact. He slid them into groups of five with his index finger, then grabbed the bottle off the floor and read it. Megan asked how many he’d taken, and Cameron frowned, then counted again and told her that all the pills were there. She scooped them off the edge of the table and into her palm, then sat down next to Gary. She told him that he wasn’t going to die, but that he probably knew that. He wasn’t stupid, or even doomed in some grander sense, just selfish, desperate, and vain. She knew it was hard, but other people had lives, and they tried very hard to do anything at all. When someone acted out like this, she said, even when they didn’t die, they were stealing from the ones who might get better. She frowned, then walked to the bathroom and flushed the pills. When she got back, she said, “Look at me.” She said she wished he’d really done it. Gary smiled at her, then retched on the ground. Megan tapped Cameron on the shoulder, and they returned to his car.
It took him a minute to start the engine. He looked harried and excited, like he’d woken up to catch a plane. Cameron got like this when she showed him something good. Once, after a Lightning Bolt concert, he spent an hour on the train, glimmering. She remembered looking at his face, roused and unthinking, and hearing the music somehow. The concert was in the winter, so he had these big mittens he’d fold in and out repeatedly. That stuff drove her insane. A few stops before their school, she snatched one of his mittens and said, “What?” He looked at her dopily. “That was so cool.” Tonight, though, she didn’t say anything, just thought about Cameron, and how he was there. Eventually he kissed her, and she stared at the skylight until it was over.
He apologized, then set his phone on the mount and told her not to worry about it, that she was a good friend. He played upbeat music on the ride home, and when Sophie called, he picked up. Megan vaped while they passed the Michaels, and she imagined Gary waking up the next afternoon having forgotten everything. Cameron talked about the difference between YouTube and TikTok for a while and said that the next generation was totally doomed, then added that the nephew was cute. When they entered the city, she saw it as a system of flows and exchanges, like a series of moving boxes. She wondered what was inside, then Cameron, talking about his Instagram, said something about content.
She showered when she got home, but she felt the same when it was over. There was some leftover macaroni and cheese in the fridge, so she ate it in front of the TV, then returned to her desk, and to her computer. Megan played video games until she couldn’t take it anymore, then she cleaned her bedroom. She swept, then vacuumed, then Swiffered, and eventually expanded into the rest of the apartment, dusting and wiping until it looked better than felt familiar, or even reasonable. There was a message on her phone, which she threw on the couch without checking what it said. On her knees now, she scrubbed the floor and examined the pad, noting granules and hairs, small bursts of filth. She thought about the girth of Gary’s body, rocking in his twin bed, and the look on his face before he puked. He was probably innocent of something; he was helpless, or at least hopeless. Eventually, she emptied her trash can and walked down to the dumpster, where she heaved the bags into the air and watched them fall over the side. Her arms felt strong, and she took the stairs without effort or volition. When she got high and went to bed, she thought about forgiveness, and who deserved it from whom.
