Mature Themes (4 page)

The summer my Tamagotchi died was the hottest on record. Its intensity relaxed by July into an oppressive norm I finally surrendered to. Shift in climate, fewer clouds, the trees do nothing. I missed my Best Western days, long before Paula's rise and fall, when air conditioning was a given. The summer my Tamagotchi died, it gasped before its personality self-deleted and said to me, “The difference between us is I can reboot whereas you cannot, you are evil, you surf mindlessly, you cannot PROTECT against bedbugs, you cannot reach your weight loss goal for just $4 a week, you cannot have infinite moments of intimate pleasure, you cannot congratulations you have been chosen for this special offer, get $10 and 6 months financing, work-at-home, you cannot make $7,487.00 per month without selling anything, it's brand new, and just about the most awesomest thing I've ever seen, the #1 easiest system ever for creating floods of cash from home, No Google, No Hard Website Code, no SEO or any of that other stuff, something totally different, you cannot start immediately, you cannot understand why this mail came to you. We have been having a meeting for the past three months that just ended a few days ago with the secretary to the United Nations, This email is to all the people that have been scammed in any part of the world, the UNITED NATIONS IN Affiliation with WORLD BANK have agreed to compensate them with the sum of $600,000. This includes every foreign contractors that may have not received their contract sum, and people that have had an unfinished transaction or international businesses that failed due to Government problems etc. Dear Sir/Madam, There is an issue with the WESTERN UNION MONEY TRANSFER PROMO in the amount of One Million Eight Hundred and Fifty Thousand United State of America Dollars $1,850,000.00 directed in cash credited to file UNP/90663/12 as 2012 payment, at the owner of this email address. This is from a total cash prize of $200,980,000.00 (US$ Two Hundred Million and Nine Hundred and Eighty Thousand US dollars) shared amongst the first fifteen (15) lucky winners in this category all over the globe. We found your name ANDREW DURBIN in the list of those who are to benefit from these compensation exercise and that is why we are contacting you, this have been agreed upon and have been signed. You are advised to contact Rev. Paul Jefferson of BANCO CAJA ESPANA of our paying center in Spain, as he is our representative in Spain, contact him immediately for your Cheque / International Bank Draft of $600,000. This funds are in a Bank Draft for security purpose ok?, so he will send it to you and you can clear it in any bank of your choice.”

PRISM

At dinner, Katy Perry cried into her napkin. “It's no big deal,” she said, waving away her personal assistant, who retreated to the corner of the room. “It's really no big deal.”

“Why are you crying?” her current boyfriend demanded, turning to her. He forced a smile at all of us around the table, his first and only gesture toward anyone else at dinner besides Katy. She looked away from him. I thought the current boyfriend should chill, but he repeated himself, putting his hand on her shoulder: “Why are you crying,
Katy
?”

She shook her head. “I'm fine, OK?”

“
Surrrrrrrre
,” he said, lowering his head toward his plate. He poked at his Isle of Gigha halibut. “Whatever.”

I looked at Katy, who stared blankly across the table, just past my shoulder toward the shadowy hallway that led to the kitchen. We were at a dinner hosted by [REDACTED], a well-known record producer who had recently terminated his contract with Virgin Records and moved back to the city where his parents had raised him, where he had attended Bronx Science, and where, in college, he had listened to Madonna's “Vogue” and decided he wanted to produce other people's sound. A wax candle separated Katy and me. It had been dripping onto a plate of white asparagus all night and was nearly gone. The room was dark and the apartment evoked—at the muted end of the Bloomberg Administration, with its sleek, glassy high-rises—the sillier vibes of a haunted house, an older, vaudeville New York, gauzy with cobwebs. We could hardly see the food on our plates.

The producer's old Upper East Side flat had gone unchanged for sixty or so years, he had told us at the start of dinner. His parents died there and he “took over” shortly thereafter, among rumors of a breakdown in Aspen.

Katy wore what looked like several dead flamingos wrapped around her from ankle to chin. The birds' necks had been twisted to form a high collar finished in gold thread and little tufts of green fur. She had described it to me as “romantic couture” when we took the elevator up to the apartment together. Perry is gorgeous by nonspecific design, accumulating color and fabric without ever fixing a permanent look, except perhaps vague kitsch, itself somewhat chic. I tried to find the heads of the flamingos among the pink feathers, but if it ever was a flock of birds those heads were long ago removed, thrown away in the garbage, the necks stuffed and sewn up, tied and fitted to form the collar of the dress.

Katy Perry had just released her third album,
Prism
. It was, at the time of our dinner, number one and showed no signs of slowing down.

[REDACTED] returned to talking about his friendship with the boys of One Direction. (We had been discussing, among many things, American vs. British pop.) We all leaned in, Katy too, as he recalled the time he swore he saw two of the boys, Louis and Harry, enter the same bedroom after a party in Tokyo, holding hands, even though the boys had been booked separate suites. When [REDACTED] asked a member of their security detail about “the sleeping situation” the next morning, he said Harry never left Louis's room. “They can't keep their hands off each other, you know.”

“They aren't gay,” I said, turning to the woman on my left, [REDACTED], who nodded in agreement. She was the dinner's resident expert on American politics, but she counted pop music among her exceptionally broad interests. Her father was a senator and she served as a representative in New York's delegation in the House. “There's no way,” I said.

“Have you seen them in concert?” [REDACTED] said to me, “How they touch one another? So gay!” He was solemn and a few people mumbled in agreement. Representative [REDACTED] finished her glass of wine and shook her head in disagreement.

“No,” I said. “You need more proof than that. They're just being boys.”

“Boys, all right,” [REDACTED] said.

We were all very drunk. Some people turned to Katy to search her face for any hint she might know about the love lives of Louis and Harry, but she had already assured us that she had no inside information (throughout the night she claimed she was too busy to have friends in the music industry). In any case, she didn't seem to be paying attention to anyone but her current boyfriend, who kept whispering in her ear in an excited, somewhat irritated manner. Finally she frowned and waved him away, then turned from all of us to stare at a wall, where somewhere her personal assistant must have been standing in the shadows. I hadn't thought the star of the night would fade so quickly, but by the second course she was nearly gone: quiet, indifferent, distracted. Her melancholy rendered her a barely visible blue at the edge of the table where the candlelight dropped off.

“The proof,” [REDACTED] said, mostly slurring, “is in their entire team, which is not only composed of assistants, producers, and other handlers, but also: a corporate mass electronic surveillance data mining program—known in some circles as DARK HORSE—run by a shadowy group of privacy experts who work at great distance from their immediate circle but who keep close tabs on them, and a number of other important celebrities, in order to control and manipulate their private lives, creating an environment of paranoia that ensures they behave on-brand and according to certain market-friendly values. Whatever they do is what gets out; the music industry—Hollywood, too—learned long ago that, in addition to controlling the media and its ‘narratives,' they had to control their product on the most basic level, that is, on the level of their personal lives, by essentially erasing that privacy and colonizing what remained. This control ultimately proves effective in terms of curbing certain off-brand impulses, like, say, gay sex among the boys of One Direction, by creating a restrictive, fear-based culture of information sharing. Everyone lives in fear that their secrets will escape and alienate them from their fans, their source of income, and fame itself. Everyone knows that someone might know something, and so nothing changes.”

He paused and made eye contact with me. I felt my jaw go slack.

Katy and the current boyfriend stood up. “We're leaving,” she said. She turned to the current boyfriend: “Let's go.”

“What? No,” [REDACTED] shouted. He stood up, knocking over his glass of wine. A waiter hurried over with a cloth to wipe up the spill, but [REDACTED] pushed him out of the way. Katy and the current boyfriend exited the dining room, flamingo feathers peeling off as they rushed to the door. The personal assistant trailed behind them, texting the driver below to ready the car. (She kept yelling: “Texting the car, texting the car!”) [REDACTED] followed them into the vestibule where they stood waiting for the elevator. Everyone at the table leapt up and moved to the hallway that led to the scene. I gathered the feathers in the dark as I moved toward the front of the apartment, where our host was frantically pleading with Katy not to go. “I was just kidding,” he said.

“No,” said the current boyfriend. “This is
so
fucking ridiculous.” Katy said nothing and didn't look at anyone. When the elevator arrived, she stepped into it and flashed us the middle finger.

“Fuck you,” the current boyfriend said as the elevator doors closed.

Katy Perry's
Prism
begins parade-like with “Roar,” soundtrack to historical remainders rediscovered on other shores, locked in the purple light of Audis on the beach or among south Florida palms on Ocean Drive, getting fucked up on the beach, getting like really fucked up on 5-Hour Energy, recoiled in glassy rainbows rising out of the sea. Katy Perry makes me feel like I'm high in the mall or tripping on GHB in a public pool. Days rendered speechless with my hair full of sand, all this blond hair full of sand and I can't stop: “Dancing through the fire cause I am the champion and you're going to hear me roar.” Like really, I can't stop. It begins a thing flittering behind the system at present, idiotically beautiful in its neon glow, the revolutionary agent of a social life made to bloom at gunpoint into something-ness, dizzying, embers left of the Members Only jacket burned at the bonfire. It is endless and somewhere there is a phrase to describe it that will come to me. I suppose it's a ball. I suppose it could be something else, too. In
Prism
, everything is leveled by a pop indifferent to individuated life. Love is everywhere and nowhere at once. It renders the varieties of experience singular, sucking it all in: flattened, affectless, and blissed out like a night spent drinking on Venice Beach. Katy's music is a mutant pop, collating genre without ever assuming the pose of a stable POV. Only “Dark Horse,” which begins with a high-pitched “oh no” before it descends below the stadium benches at the high school football game to romance taken up among the shadows, Eros made cosmic in its troubled gorgeousness, suggests any configuration outside the usual boy-girl love, boy-girl breakup, boy-girl regret, boy-girl makeup. “Make me your Aphrodite, your one and only. Make me your enemy,” she sings. Later: Juicy J raps, “She eat your heart out like Jeffrey Dahmer”—a necrophiliac cannibal who murdered, dismembered, and consumed seventeen boys in the 1980s—before he reverts (as the album often does) to cliché: love is an addiction. But is Katy addicted to dismembering and eating her lovers? In her America, which closely resembles everyone else's, we love fuck party live forever, even if living forever happens to be terminally clichéd: “All we have is this moment,” “They say one man's trash is another man's treasure.” It is a feeling that organizes other feelings into one feeling that describes only itself: an ocean of nostalgia that I love to swim in.

The dinner party followed them down in the next elevator. When we arrived outside of the apartment, Katy stood on the sidewalk, waiting for her driver to pull up.

“Katy, Katy,” [REDACTED] said. She looked at each of us, moving her eyes from face to face, but said nothing. Her current boyfriend moved forward to block our host from getting any closer.

“Hey, man,” he said, “I, like, really need you to step the fuck back.”

“No, no, I understand,” he said, “I just don't see why you have to leave. I am happy to apologize. I am
sorry
.”

“Sorry won't cut it, asshole,” Katy said. I stared at her neck in the streetlight to see if I could finally make out the heads of the flamingos wrapped into the collar, but I still couldn't see any of them. Our host tried to approach Katy and the current boyfriend, but the current boyfriend stepped up and pushed him back.

“Man, I told you to step back,” he said.

From around the corner, a Bentley pulled up and stopped at the entrance to the building. A driver stepped out and opened the door for them. She frowned at us before entering the car. I watched her slide into the heavenly seclusion of its leather interior. The driver shut the door. [REDACTED] began to knock on the window. The driver immediately yanked him back by his shoulder. “Touch my car again, buddy, and I'll break your fucking hand.”

“OK, OK,” he said, and stepped back, putting his hands in his pockets.

The driver nodded and got into the car. They drove off.

Katy's sudden absence felt oceanic. But when I looked at it, at the vacant, shadowy 72nd Street, I saw nothing, neither the other dinner guests nor the car as it began to turn onto Lexington. I saw nothing that would allow me to define “ocean,” as in the biological and ecological contingency that has come to mean “ocean,” let alone “absence.” This, like other things, was OK, even a little nice.
Prism
is itself an ocean of feeling. Its waves quiver under a moon the shape of Katy's transformative, prismatic face ebbing in the dark, haloed in blue.

Your ocean is flowing toward me, Katy, I thought, as I stood under the canopy of a palm tree at the empty shore, which wasn't so much a palm as it was a pun on the fist unballed before a reader who began to trace its creases. He ran his fingers along the groove of my palm, searching the revelatory lines that have crossed one another to locate the coordinates of some future rapidly becoming present.

I asked him what it meant, but he just shook his head.

I looked at him and tried to understand what this might mean, but he didn't seem to know. He sat at his desk and sighed, looked at his computer screen, and transferred information he located in several databases into a few Excel spreadsheets open on his desktop in preparation for an extended memo due at the end of the week. His chair squeaked and he wrote a Post-it note to remind himself to tell head of operations that he needs a new chair. He occasionally looked at the clock near his outgoing mailbox. As always, he felt “stretched thin.”

He often wondered if his coworkers were as bored as he always was. He doesn't have an office window to look out of but he frequently likes to pause in his day to imagine what is outside the building: the parking lot, the road that leads out of Virginia and back to D.C. He finds this life theoretically beautiful though in practice he could see himself doing other work. That other work remains unknown in its details to him but he thinks about what it could be fairly often. It would be something practical but beautiful.

Whenever the song “Dark Horse” plays on his iPod shuffle, the reader thinks about suggesting that title as a name for a program the office—or rather, the complex of agencies collated into what he refers to as “the office”—is developing. The song, like the other songs on the album, reminds the reader of a time he had dinner with a high school girlfriend's parents, the night of a significant local football game. Her father was an intolerant man who, after 9/11, found a vital resource for his hatred in the internet. Her father peddled in conspiracies related to the complicity of the Bush Administration in designing and executing the attacks, which he cryptically referred to as “the Opening.” He would often begin sentences: “Before the Opening” or “After the Opening.” The Opening, as he described it to the reader, was the event that both admitted the veracity of the lie and the falsity of the truth simultaneously; that is, the Opening articulated two points about reality, holographic in its lush, simulated surfaces: one, that the perceivable conditions of life in the United States were lies that covered up the generators of those conditions and, two, the lies pre empted what created them and so remain the primary “reality” (and not, as shadier conspiracies might have it, the reverse). He liked to say that facts were useless things. What matters is the dream that gives those facts a purpose, a life.