Notes From the Internet Apocalypse (10 page)

“Don’t I?” I said. “Fuck this. I need to earn money.”

“You will, dumbass. When you’re a lawyer.”

“That’s not for two more years. What ’til then? We gonna move in with your mom in California?”

“We’ll do whatever we have to do. We’ll do what people do. But you don’t have to give up being a lawyer.”

“Well, what if I don’t want to be a lawyer? What the fuck is a lawyer? Even now, Professor Hollister said she could get me a job at the Workers’ Compensation Board. Isn’t that all I want? A job? To be a real live grown-up?”

“I don’t know? What do you want?”

“I want to be your husband. I want to be a daddy. And I don’t care about any of the rest.”

*   *   *

Oz took off her shirt and leaned all the way back with me still inside her. Her hair grazed my ankles, and I licked my thumb before placing it for maximum impact. I stroked the geometry of sex with a confidence unknown in my twenties, and she couldn’t stop the words from flowing.

“Fuck me, Daddy,” she moaned.

I waited for the taboo of her exclamation to start a chain reaction of reproach. But it didn’t. I sat up, swelling inside her and then bared down with my full weight, both my hands on her wrists, holding her down.

“Say that again.” My voice rough and warm in her ear.

“Fuck me.”

I took my right hand off her wrist just long enough to slap her face. Her gasp interrupting moans.

“Good girl,” I said, and laid my body against hers. My hands beneath her shoulders. Fingers curling up and over, pulling her into me.

I was a grown-up. A full-blown man. Even if my baby died inside my wife while she was still my fiancée. Even if that wife was gone now too. Even if the words in this journal will wither, never seeing the light of the Internet. I was in Oz, getting the job done. I was a man.

DAY 50. CRAIGSLIST

Oz smoked her cigarettes, and I smoked her cigarettes too, but after a shower, we set out in search of Tobey. Oz led the way. In our two weeks apart, she had learned all about the latest non-technological advances in our Internet-less world. Much like pornography, knowledge had become too easily obtained and we couldn’t go without. We needed our answers to flow more freely than our desire to look for them, and although the Net was gone, other things rose to take its place.

Oz told me that the Library of Congress had hired hundreds of new librarians simply for the purpose of researching and responding to queries. For one dollar, you could fax a question in and, using the resources of America’s largest library, the answer would be tracked down and faxed back to you within twenty-four hours. Some of the requested information was more important than others.

“Check your pocket,” Oz said.

“What?”

“I got you a present. Gave it to you while you were sleeping.”

I reached inside my jacket, keeping my eyes on Oz.

“Go ahead,” she reassured me. “It’s okay.”

I slowly pulled out a piece of paper, folded into fours. It was a fax from the Library of Congress, reading, “From 1982 to 1984 Jason Bateman portrayed Derek Taylor on
Silver Spoons.
”

“Aww, thanks,” I said.

“Yeah, well, I got tired of hearing you and Tobey bitch about it,” she said. “But that shit’s nothing compared to Jeeves.”

Turns out that if you were fortunate enough to live in New York City—still the greatest city in the world, even if people were leaving in droves and the threat of terrorist attacks increased daily—you had an even more impressive alternative for acquiring information. You could ask Jeeves.

His real name was Dan McCall, but apparently this fifty-year-old former Columbia University librarian now only answered to “Jeeves.” He quit his job the week after the Net went down, and every day from noon to four he would roll his tiny stack table, folding chair, and trunk containing reference materials to the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park to answer questions. But Jeeves’s greatest resource was his photographic memory filled with limitless details of historical and trivial import. Also, he was psychic. That was apparently a big part of the appeal too.

He charged five dollars a question. If Jeeves could answer you, he kept the money. If he could provide only related information, he gave you back two dollars. And if your query returned no results, your money was refunded. Supposedly, that had never happened unless you asked about the Internet.

“Wow, that’s pretty amazing,” I said. “How’d you hear about this?”

“Christ, Gladstone. Everyone’s heard about it. Have you been doing anything for the last two weeks besides jerking off?”

I took a nip from my flask. “Does drinking count?”

“Fucking lush. Come on, I wanna get to Craigslist before it gets too crowded.”

“Craigslist? What happened to Jeeves?”

Oz looked at me with disgust. “Jeeves is where histrionic, thirty-year-old Sheilas go to find out if their boyfriends are ever gonna propose.”

I followed Oz to the 4-5-6 subway stop by Union Square. What used to be a promenade for slackers and artists to smoke, sketch, and skateboard had been transformed. Now it was a promenade for slackers to smoke, sketch, skateboard, and tack index cards to a huge cheap plywood wall. Much like the real Craigslist, the board had been separated into sections: jobs, items for sale, sexual seekers. The overall numbers were smaller, but the odds of ending up a leather gimp in someone’s basement were about the same.

“This is how I found a roommate when I couldn’t get back into the hotel,” Oz said.

“Yeah, but how will this help us find Tobey? What kind of post are we looking for? Single White Male seeks eighties references and tits?”

“I dunno, but it couldn’t hurt to start looking.”

I searched the cards for close to an hour without any leads. Someone had posted a card reading “highly intelligent twenty-something seeks at-home job requiring no work. Hours must be flexible,” but that could have been anyone. For the most part, the wall was flooded with ads for antiquated gaming systems. The loss of online gaming and even Flash distractions had left people jonesing for some seated, hand/eye-coordinated entertainment. Somehow, playing Xbox alone and offline was too depressing. Antiques, however, were exciting and novel. Less of a reminder of what was lost. There was a Vectrex from ’84 on sale for nine hundred dollars, and even a bunch of games relying on ball, hole, and spring technology were selling for more than I’d ever imagined.

Just before my frustration reached its peak, I felt Oz slip her arms around me from behind and rest her head against my shoulder like my own guardian angel of affection.

“Aww, you still want to ask Jeeves, don’t you?” she said.

Ask Jeeves

Oz and I took a long slow walk to Central Park, pretending a life was possible supported only by my disability payments and her rack-based ability to earn extra cash on an as-needed basis. It was the kind of fragile new infatuation that let simple answers carry more weight than they deserved because further exploration would send the whole thing tumbling down.

“Do you think you’ll ever go back to work?” she would ask.

“I prefer not to,” I’d reply. “What’s your real name?”

“Isn’t it sexier not knowing?”

“Who’s your friend in New York?”

*   *   *

It was 2:00
P.M.
by the time we reached the park, and the line to Jeeves was already fifty people deep. A bunch of Internet zombies were milling about in their circles, but most of them gave Jeeves a wide berth for fear of accidentally obtaining some actual knowledge. He sat there with his balding ponytail and poorly defined goatee, dispensing information from a folding chair. Sometimes he consulted his books—the
OED
or an encyclopedia. Sometimes he grabbed the person’s hand to answer the more personal, psychic-based questions. But usually he would just roll his eyes in disgust and dispense answers one by one while collecting his money.

Q:   “What’s the average yearly rainfall in the Amazon rain forest?”

A:   “Six feet, seven inches.”

Q:   “Will I ever find a job I don’t hate?”

A:   “No.”

Q:   “Is there a God?”

A:   “I don’t know if a God exists, but anyone who claims to be certain of His absence probably lacks humility more than faith.”

Jeeves gave the God guy back two of his five dollars on that one and whistled “Onward Christian Soldiers” as he placed the remaining three in his lockbox.

A skinny sixteen-year-old boy came up next, dropping five singles on the table.

“Where’s the Internet?” he asked.

Jeeves’s arrogance gave way to irritation. “I get that question every single day. I don’t know.”

“But you know everything. How can you not know?”

“Well, I don’t, okay?” he said, pulling down on the rising edges of his
Dark Side of the Moon
t-shirt.

The boy reached to take back his five dollars, and Jeeves stopped him.

“Only take two,” he said.

“Why?” the boy asked. “You haven’t told me anything.”

“I don’t know where the Internet is, but I just felt something.… There is someone who will find it.”

Jeeves stood and held up his hands as if absorbing psychic visions through his palms.

“I can feel it. I can see him. In my mind. There will be … for lack of a better phrase … an Internet Messiah. He will come. And he will return the Net to us.”

Jeeves sat down, spent from his pronouncement. A buzz worked its way through the crowd. A couple of YouTube zombies were even distracted enough to let their trapped cat run off to freedom. For a moment, it seemed all of Central Park was quiet.

“You’re not just saying that so you can keep three of my dollars, are you?”

“Next!” Jeeves screamed, and within a moment, he was back to spewing answers. “Hammerin’ Hank Greenberg; The Articles of Confederation; leave it alone or it will get infected; no, he will never marry you; Jason Bateman…”

We continued advancing as Jeeves dispatched about thirty people, until only a few stood between us. From our new place in line we could now only hear the questions.

“Okay, Jeeves,” someone said. “Question. Who would give better head: 1977 Lynda Carter or 2001 Angelina Jolie?”

“Are they dressed as Wonder Woman and Lara Croft, respectively?”

“Of course!”

“Well,” Jeeves said. “It’s a cliché, but I have to go with Angelina Jolie.”

“Wrong! The answer is Demi Moore as G.I. Jane, but keep the money, Mr. Know-It-All.”

I didn’t need the crowd to clear to know I’d found Tobey. And not just because of his Demi Moore infatuation, but because this was someone who managed to take pride in stumping an educated psychic with a completely subjective and arbitrary question. Still, I can’t tell you how happy I was to see the goofy bastard. I rushed to the front, and we screamed and hugged and punched each other the way you do when your emotions are greater than your arsenal of clichés.

“Fuck, am I happy to see you,” he said. “I just spent my last five dollars.”

“You spent your last five dollars to ask Jeeves a blowjob question?”

“I know,” Tobey said. “Now I can’t get that Jaguar.”

“Seriously, Tobes. How did you manage to survive New York for two weeks without me?”

It seems Tobey had gotten a job tending bar at Stand Up NY and spent the rest of his time barking tickets in the street in exchange for a place to stay. Apparently, the manager had been a big fan of his blog.

The loss of the Web had changed the stand-up scene. More and more comics were going retro with Henny Youngman-style one liners. At first, Tobey thought that the loss of the Net had people nostalgic for a simpler time. But after a few days, he realized the comics were merely using all the Tweets they couldn’t spew to their followers. Seeming to take special delight from the phenomenon, Tobey told me about one night when Rob Delaney and Michael Ian Black did a combined two hours with every joke weighing in at fewer than 140 characters.

“Really?” I asked. “How was that?”

“Retarded. How do you think it was?”

“Well…”

“Actually,” Tobey said, “I did hear one good one: ‘FYI to ladies trying to distinguish yourselves by playing hard to get: sucking cock better also works.’”

I laughed. “Who wrote that one?”

“I did,” Tobey said. “Right now. Fuck, I miss Twitter.”

I was about to respond, but I suddenly felt consumed by an overwhelmingly antsy and negative energy. I turned to the woman behind me, who was about thirty years old and filled with venom.

“Are you going to go?” she asked. “Some of us have important questions about our boyfriends.”

“Save your money,” Oz said. “With an attitude like that I’m sure you turned him gay long ago.”

The line ahead of us had cleared, and Jeeves was tapping his fleshy fingers, waiting for me.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “My question got answered already.”

Jeeves stood up and pointed, but his words did not come.

“Look, no offense. I was just searching for this jackass here, and I found him, so…”

“It’s you!” Jeeves stammered.

“I’m not sure—”

“You’re here.”

The crowd that already hung on Jeeves’s every word was now listening more closely than ever. They began to circle the table.

“It’s him!” he screamed. “It’s the Internet Messiah!”

8.

DAY 50. THE INTERNET MESSIAH

Sometimes you just do things without knowing why. When Jeeves dubbed me the Internet Messiah, I started running. Maybe it was because he had seemed so collected and self-possessed moments before and now was gasping for words and pointing at me in spasmodic fits. Maybe it was the hunger clawing out from the sunken eyes of the YouTube zombies. Or maybe it was the crippling attention of Central Park. But I ran as fast and as far as I could, and Tobey and Oz, either possessed by the same spirit or just trying to look after me, followed.

It wasn’t hard to outrun Jeeves. He started coughing and spitting after only a few steps, but from the bouncing blur of my peripheral vision, I could see inquisitive pedestrians take his place. They turned and pointed and joined the herd one by one. Oz kept pace with me, dressed more functionally today in a pair of jeans and Doc Martens. Tobey was hauling ass a few steps behind with a huge grin on his face.