Notes From the Internet Apocalypse (9 page)

“Nah, man, sorry, I can’t help. But I’ll tell you what I tell everyone who can’t find what they’re looking for. Head over to the Rule 34 Club.”

“Rule 34?”

“That’s right. Y’know, Rule 34, like they used to say: if it exists, there’s porn of it. I work the door on Fridays. They got everything.”

DAY 38. THE RULE 34 CLUB

The bouncer’s suggestion was officially my best and only lead, so I began to ask around. Apparently, Rule 34 was a high-end porn club, secretly catering to the most esoteric and craven sexual displays. Things that would make even a German search engine blush. And unlike the rest of the sex trade, it wasn’t in Times Square. Instead, Rule 34 operated in the financial district, just off Stone Street, looking quite like an upscale N.Y. steakhouse. That was part of the appeal: you had a legit reason for being there.

I arrived around seven. The restaurant was filled with many well-tailored Japanese businessmen. Younger day traders congregated around the bar, discernible from the college frat boys they used to be only by receding hairlines and finer clothes.

“Do you require a table, sir?” the maitre d’ asked.

I didn’t know what to say. People were definitely eating, and there was no obvious back room. Was there a password?

“… Fidelio?” I asked.

He rolled his eyes. “Or perhaps you’d care to dine on the lower level?” he suggested.

“Yes. That. Thank you.”

“Wonderful. Our hostess will seat you.”

I was led to the center of the restaurant by a sophisticated and decidedly not flirtatious young woman in a little black dress. When we reached a gold-handled staircase, she pulled back the red velvet rope and, in one fluid motion, gestured downward for my descent.

“Thank you for visiting Rule 34. Your imagination awaits you.”

I walked the darkened steps alone until I reached the first of what I came to learn were three circular and segmented lower levels. Each segment held a room of about forty spectators and a brightly lit stage at the center kept the rest of the audience in total anonymous darkness. That’s all I could discern from the small square window in the theater’s back door.

I approached an information desk in the center of the first level, manned by another attractive, yet decidedly sexless woman, also in a little black dress, sitting behind a table covered in fine red silk. She appeared too thin to successfully menstruate.

“Welcome to Rule 34,” she said. “Would you like to fill out a request and entrance form?”

I took the clipboard. There was a hundred-dollar entrance fee just to begin, and then additional fees depending on the feasibility of your request. I stepped to the side to complete my paperwork, where an impeccably dressed man in his late forties was already scribbling away. After a moment, he deposited his fine gold pen into his suit pocket and handed his form in to Coco. (I’m going to assume her name was Coco.) She took some time to review.

“Okay … I will need to get back to you with exact specifics,” she said without a trace of judgment. “But I can tell you this is going to require somewhere in the neighborhood of an additional thousand dollars and several days prep time.”

He wasn’t pleased. You could tell that by the way his color began to match the red of the tablecloth and also because he said, “I am not pleased.” That was a bit of a giveaway. Even to me, who had so much Scotch pumping that I was triple-checking my form for errors in case our sexlessly seductive friend were to take issue with my spelling.

“Isn’t this supposed to be the Rule 34 Club?” he demanded.

“Yes, sir, but…”

“My imagination awaits me?”

“Yes, sir, but fictional characters always require an additional contribution.”

“Surely, that can’t be unexpected. This is bullshit.”

“Sir, if you wanted to watch Lara Croft in a three-way with Batman and Caprica Six from
Battlestar Galactica,
we could easily accommodate you. In fact, that’s going on right now in room seventeen. But certain requests take time.”

The man checked his watch and exhaled harder than necessary. “Think you can get it done by Friday?”

“Probably, and we have your contact information.”

“Fine.”

He left a deposit to place his order. As she shuffled her papers, I could just barely discern the description of his request: Cthulhu furiously masturbating.

Yeah, that would do it.

I handed Coco my papers and saw an instant look of relief on her face. I’d simply written “twenty-something Australian punk rock girl.”

“Ah, this will be no problem,” she said. “And you’re in luck. There’s actually a show starting in about thirty minutes. Twenty dollars, please.”

I sat in the dark of the deceptively elegant and functional theater. The seats were leather, which I imagined cleaned a lot better than cloth. It was almost too dark to find your way without falling, but I guess they weren’t sweating too many trip-and-fall lawsuits. After all, who would want to admit where they were at the time of the incident?

The stage was lit and empty, but there were still things to look at. Much like YouTube gave you other suggested videos, or porn sites offered silent GIFs along the margins, each wall of my theater had three plasma screen TVs stacked in a row, mutely revealing what was going on in the other rooms. Barely discernible bodies and images moving in silence. It was hard to be sure, but so help me, I swear that in one of them I saw Screech from
Saved by the Bell
getting dominated by the
Small Wonder
chick.

Right on time, the lights on stage began to swell and bleed while music seeped in. If I’m not mistaken it was a sexier sax-based version of Men at Work’s “Down Under”
.
And just as it got to the “six foot four and full of muscles” part, a thought occurred to me: what if it were Oz? Surely, I couldn’t watch her. She might have let strangers gawk at her showering online, but this was real life. And I knew her. I couldn’t violate her like that. I decided that if those flaring spotlights oozing back and forth from red to blue shone upon Oz when the curtain rose, I would stand on my chair and call out to her. I would take her from here.

But when the show started, I quickly discerned it wasn’t Oz. Just some tattoo’d skank getting double-teamed by two guys with Mohawks. The show lasted about twenty minutes, and I stayed until the end. Even when the guys started urinating on her. I hadn’t put that on my request form, but it seemed to do good things for the guy two rows ahead of me, and that’s when I realized Rule 34 probably had to double up on requests out of necessity.

When it was over, I checked out one of the other rooms I saw in the preview panels. And then another. And that’s how it went. Room to room, drink to drink until my flask was empty. And then as a testament to 34’s special appeal, I still didn’t leave. It was the most successful re-creation of the Internet I’d seen yet. Like looking at one horrible car accident after another, all of which somehow gave you an inexplicable and shameful erection. At around 3:00
A.M.
, I finally went home vowing never to return to Rule 34, where I had spent hours and hours staring so intently at things I never wanted to see.

DAY 49. OLD-SCHOOL PEEP SHOW

I have spent every day of the last week at Rule 34. If I weren’t drinking so heavily I don’t think I could live with myself. And frankly, I wasn’t built to drink this hard. I can handle functional alcoholism, at best. This full-blown indulgence has my stomach in flames. A fire that can only be doused with more booze that stokes the flame minutes later like those trick birthday candles that are now only bought ironically, or un-ironically by the worst people in the world. Had I been back at the hotel, with just silence and fire, I might have put the bottle down. Or even if I were walking the streets, needing my wits about me to contend with the ever-changing Apocalypse. But I was here. At Rule 34. Distracted from everything outside and above ground. Filling my mind with nothing but head-shakingly awful porn and my body with Scotch. A few days ago, I tried to get my head straight upstairs with a filet mignon. It was expertly prepared, but my body didn’t want it, and I had to push it aside after a few bites.

The club was open 24/7, and some days I hadn’t even gone home to sleep, catching periodic cat naps in the various theaters after the shows had ended. I hadn’t even put in a request since day two. Instead, I just followed the perversity of the suggested viewing, from window to room, window to room. It was cheaper that way anyway. There was only a ten-dollar charge for watching someone else’s request. They made the majority of the money catering to special whims like that Cthulhu gentleman. After about a week, I realized I had not spoken to another person in days. Not one word. Just me. Drinking in the dark and lit only by the display before me.

I stumbled from a theater where Smurfette was blowing Gargamel and headed back to the information desk.

“Form please, Coco,” I said.

It was a different woman. I think. Same dress and a severe short black haircut. She handed me a clipboard, and I quickly put in my request. She scanned it several times.

“I’m sorry, sir. I don’t … what is this?”

“What? It’s right there. It’s what I want.”

“But I don’t understand—”

“What is this bullshit?” I asked. “You can show us Cthulhu masturbating, Lieutenant Uhura and Agent Scully getting bi-curious, but I write one simple name and you’re giving me shit?”

“I’m not trying to be difficult—”

“It’s right there! One name. It’s what I want. I’ll pay anything!”

“It’s not a question of money,” she said. “It’s—”

“It’s what?”

She waited for a moment, and then asked as simply as she could, “Who’s Romaya?”

*   *   *

I walked out of 34, needing a shower and two days’ sleep. I saw the sun and didn’t like it. I thought about the hotel and the no one waiting for me. I kept walking. You couldn’t call it lost because I had no destination. And maybe it was luck or maybe it was just my body trying to reboot after having frozen on so many undesirable screens, but I found myself back at the beginning. Right at that shitty costume store/porn shop on Forty-third and Eighth.

But this time, I noticed something different. In addition to the porn, there was a peep show. Old-school girls behind glass. I bought a rubber mask that only covered the nose and eyes so I could still drink, and headed in. The room was small and dark, and reeked of what I hoped was bleach. I took a seat in front of the window, and a young woman with brown hair and glasses sat in a kimono on the other side. She was too pretty to be here.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, what do you like?” She reached over to the small table by her side to crush out a cigarette. “Wanna tell me what you like?”

“I’d prefer not to,” I heard myself say.

“Well, my name’s Maya,” she said, and uncrossed her legs. Her kimono opened slightly, still holding to her breast, but revealing a dolphin tattoo below her waist.

“Hello, Maya,” I said. “Will you just sit here with me for a minute?”

“It’s your money,” she said, and let the kimono open further. “So what should I call you?”

“Call me … Gladstone,” I said, and took off my mask.

Maya jumped off her chair and closed her kimono.

“What the fuck, Gladstone?!”

I didn’t understand. She banged up against the glass, crying. No. Not crying. Happy.

“It’s me! Oz!”

7.

DAY 49. RETURN TO OZ

It didn’t seem possible that in a world devoid of Facebook, Twitter, and people-finding apps like Foursquare, I had somehow managed to locate a five-foot-five Australian girl among the 700,000 people still living in the city. Even stranger, I hadn’t recognized her.

Oz ran from her tiny glass room, clear heels clacking in the hallway, and when she burst through my door, kissing me and holding me tight, I couldn’t help but think of Romaya and how we loved each other when we were that young.

“Christ, Gladstone,” she said, pulling back suddenly. “Why do you reek of Drakkar Noir?”

Her hair was longer now and flowed in California redwood colors without the distraction of store-bought fluorescents. Sexy librarian glasses had taken the place of disposable contacts. And her accent had somewhat dissolved into a softer dialect of unknown origin. Oz saw the confusion on my face.

“What is it?” she asked. “Have you found Tobey? The Internet?”

I just stared, unsure of what I was trying to remember.

“Maybe we should just get you back to the hotel. You don’t look right, and you smell like a New Jersey mall.”

*   *   *

Oz filled my head with whispered stories while I slept. Stories about the government releasing her after a brief interrogation, about losing her purse and keys in the arrest, and about how she did visit the hotel in the first three days, but no one answered the door or took her calls. She still couldn’t find her friend, and she moved on, looking for work and shelter. I was too tired to respond to any of it. Or maybe it was just a feeling of contentment I didn’t want to disturb with words.

In the morning, I woke with Oz straddling my back. “Wake up, old man,” she said. “Time to find the Internet.”

I rolled over beneath her and placed a hand on each of her thighs. “First we have to get Tobey. It would be too sad to find it without him.”

“There’s something I want to do even before that,” she said and leaned over to put her glasses on the nightstand. The soft of her t-shirt caught my stubble.

“What’s that? Discuss your daddy issues?”

“I don’t have daddy issues.”

I slid my hands further up Oz’s thighs until she could no longer pretend to be cool.

“In my experience,” I said, “women either have daddy issues or a cock.”

“Bastard.”

She closed her eyes so I couldn’t see her smile was everywhere.

*   *   *

Romaya was upset, and I worried about the effect of the stress on our two-week-old baby growing inside her.

“What the fuck?” she said. “This isn’t the nineteen-fifties. You don’t have to drop out of law school just because I’m pregnant.”