The Empire of Distraction

Jonathon woke up hungry. His eyes were tied shut, his mouth was blank, and his head was like a box of wool floating on a sea of silence. Jonathon woke up and decided that today he was going to try to spend 14-hours on the internet. He had nowhere to be and nothing to do and no one to speak to today so he was going to spend 14-hours on the internet. But first he was hungry.

He grabbed a milk-n-cereal bar from the dresser next to him. The kind that has the milk as this thin waste-paste on the underside of a bar of fused oats. Whoever invented them was a criminal, a torturer, a real-life villain that should be tried by the UN as a human rights violator. Still, Jonathon ate them, he ate them every day and he was pissed when they ran out. He loved cereal and milk-n-cereal bars were easier than getting out a bowl, getting out a spoon and the box of cereal and mixing them together and then washing them in the sink. The thought was torturous, the effort was too much. This way all he had to do was unwrap it and eat the poisoned thing. It wasn't as good as a bowl of cereal but it was three times as fast. That meant more of his 14 hours could be spent exploring the secrets that could be found on the internet.

Also, this way he wouldn't have to face the roommate. He wouldn’t have to wander out to the kitchen to find a bowl and a spoon, wouldn’t have endure the grilling stares and guarded, insinuating greetings. Tension had been building these last few weeks, escalating. Each tense sentence and subtle putdown countered by some pile of dishes, some rotting applecores left on the table, an unflushed toilet. Feint and counter. The kid, Rich, the kid couldn't flush the toilet. It was physically impossible for him. Pain shot up and down his arm whenever he touched the handle. He had cluster headaches as soon as the water started spiraling into the S-trap. Every time Jonathon walked in to brush his teeth or comb his hair or pop a zit, there was a big yellow pot of piss staring him in the face. It started to stain the bowl, even when there was no piss in it, it still looked yellow and cracked. Three or four time he found Rich's shit floating in there. Jonathon finally stopped flushing it when he found it, hoping Rich would get the point. He didn't. So Jonathon just learned to use the bathroom as little as possible. Besides, that meant there was always more time to spend on the internet.

Rich had now taken to eating Jonathon's food without asking him and then denying it. Jonathon would say, "So hey, Rich. How were my toaster pastries?" and Rich would give him a blank stare and say that he didn't know what Jonathon was talking about. But everyday there was one more missing, one more hiding in Rich’s stomach and laughing. So Jonathon moved all the food into his room, made space in his dresser and on his cabinet for it all and now the milk-n-cereal bars were right next to his bed for when he woke up in the morning hungry. And no bowl to wash meant he didn't even have to leave the room. He could keep the door closed for all 14-hours he planned to be on the internet today. He wondered what Rich was eating for breakfast now that the toaster pastries--and the toaster--were on Jonathon's dresser.

Jonathon sat down at his computer, punched in his screen-saver password and within seconds he was back on the internet, right where he had been last night before he decided it was past time to sleep. He had been gone for about 7 and a half hours and he needed to see if anything had changed in his absence. Was everything the same? Or had there been movement, had there been vision and color and quests? First he checked his email. Apparently there were “hot girls from your state” just waiting to meet him. He assumed from the email that they wanted to fuck. June had written back about the youtube video he had sent her of a monkey hang-gliding. There was an important message about the size of his penis and/or increasing it. A very important message.

There was also a message about ‘the formless vagabond tubers and the anarchy club.” Jonathon at first thought this was a postmodernist, freewheeling, free-associative story that Chris, his friend from high school, said he was working on since the sender was named Chris. So he read half of it and it was wild and insane and degrading and everything postmodernist stories are supposed to be. There were talking chairs, and talking vaginas, and burritos that bled, and cannibal animals and men with horns and all that kind of shit.

“This is pretty good,” Jonathon said to himself. “This is pretty funny.” Then he realized it was just a spam email that had combined strings of random words with a link at the bottom. He didn’t know what it was for. Chris was not Chris. This story was not a story at all. He junked it.

His email box was empty. He checked his myspace. Sammy left a comment about a party that weekend that Jonathon would not be attending no matter what, ever. There was no fucking way. He checked the auctions he was following on ebay, none of which he planned to buy. He just liked to follow them, see who won and for how much. High drama. Today he was following a vintage Elvis Costello t-shirt, a house on the beach in Hawaii, and GI Joe action figures. He checked craigslist for hot girls from his state who wanted to fuck. They were all fat. There were always all fat.

He looked at his watch. He had just somehow spent an hour on the internet in the course of only four paragraphs. There were only 13 hours left. This was going good. This would be easy. Thirteen hours on the internet. What could he do next? He could do so many things on the internet. He could read his webcomics, download some music, download some porno, play some card games against people, play some war games against people, he could frag some n00bz, he could find some more videos with monkeys, or hang-gliders or both and send them to June.

Sammy IMed him. “Hey brooo! U comin to my party?!?! OR WHAT?!”

“No,” typed Jonathon. “Please stop typing like a 10-year old.”

“Dood! WTF! U better show @ da party! Biggest party on da west coast, broooo!!!”

“No,” typed Jonathon. “I have a doctor’s appointment.”

“@ 11pm on Saturday?” typed Sammy.

“House call,” said Jonathon as he typed it.

“Whatevs, dick.”

Jonathon spent some time on a stranger’s blog. This stranger liked kung-fu movies and William Burroughs. Jonathon could respect that, that seemed perfectly reasonable and he thought to himself that this stranger seemed like a good person, someone he could get along with. Uh oh, he also liked the Grateful Dead. Jonathon decided to leave a nasty comment but then didn’t when he saw that anonymous comments were disabled. Oh well. What a dickhead.

10 hours to go. He opened a bag of pretzels and had a juicebox. He checked Rich’s blog to see if there was any mention of him in it. There wasn’t. Rich never wrote about anything that could be considered ‘real-life.’ He mostly wrote about sexual misadventures with imaginary whores that he claimed to be sleeping with, and imaginary situations where he wound up buttfucking them in the back of Volkswagens or in elevators or cemeteries. Then they’d be caught be gravediggers or something and instead of calling the cops, the gravediggers would just join in the fun. Rich’s blog was like the Penthouse letters page crossed with an unending series of Freudian slips. It was high entertain, psychologically revealing and sleazy as fuck. Jonathon hoped he made it onto the blog someday.

Jonathon checked youtube for more monkey videos. He found an otter one but decided that the otter craze was totally last month. A month on the internet was a lifetime, you see, whole fads rose and fell, whole civilizations thrived and decayed, whole flames wars fought and won. A month was a lifetime, but the 8 hours he had left on the internet—that was nothing. Ever since a video had turned up of a monkey in a Brazilian Kentucky Fried Chicken, monkeys had been in, way in. See, the monkey had somehow gotten into the kitchen of this place and started eating all the chicken, just tearing into it, and when the employees tried to stop it, the little monster bit them. Then it started throwing the streaming goop that was supposed to be mash potatoes at everything, at the walls, at the ceiling, at the employees and customers and even the guy with the videophone who would upload the video in a few hours. Finally, the monkey fell asleep in the open drawer of cash register and everyone agreed that it was the cutest thing they had ever seen anywhere ever. Monkeys were in.

Jonathon checked Cindy’s myspace profile. Her status was still single. She had taken down all the pictures of them together. Deleted all of his comments, stretching back two years even. Some new guy was leaving her comments, three of them actually, three dudes he had never seen or heard of ever before. He looked at their profiles, Chuck and Dave and ‘Thumpster tha #1 Stunna’. What a bunch of total fucking douchebags. These were the kind of guys Cindy was hanging around these days? He looked at the pictures of her for a long time. Tried to remember what she looked like when she sat on her bed, wrapped in a blanket and smiling at him. He suddenly had a vision of her fucking Chuck and Dave and ‘Thumpster tha #1 Stunna’ all at once, all tangled up in bed with them, like an 8-legged human spider, tied in knots and eating itself. ‘Thumpster’ planted firmly in her mouth.

Fuck. He closed the window. Fuckfuck.

He IMed Sara.

“Hey Sara.”

“Hey Jonny. What’s up?”

“What’s up with all those dudes on Cindy’s profile?”

“I told you to stop looking at her profile, Jon! What the fuck, Jon, you gotta get over her.”

“I know. But I looked. I feel really bad now. Like … really bad. I feel like my lungs are melting, Sara. Is she fucking them?”

“I don’t think so. Anyways it's none of your business.”

“It’s all my business.”

“Don’t be creepy Jon. You know she has a watcher on her page right? She can see every time you look at her profile, she knows it.”

“I know.”

“So why do you still look?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are you doing today, Jon?”

“I am spending 14-hours on the internet today.”

“Nice. You should get outside, see some sunshine and birds.”

The sun was streaming in through his blinds leaving these ugly, bright bars across the monitor. They hurt his eyes. He turned the blinds the opposite way, keeping out as much light as possible.

“Hey Sara,” he typed.

“What’s up?”

“Sammy invited me to his party again,” typed Jonathon. Sammy and Sara used to date until he got wasted and fucked one of the drunk girls at one of his parties.

“Sammy’s a dick.” The girl at Sammy’s party was into it at first but was crying by the end, as she sobered up. His friend Robbie videotaped it all and they put the tape on the internet, with commentary about what a stupid, silly, emotional bitch she was, recorded afterwards.

“Yeah I know. He types like a 10-year old,” Jonathon typed.

“His party is going to suck.” They sent the video to all of her friends, sent it to her sister.

“I know. Do you want to play me in a game of Scrabble?”

“Sure.” The girl was humiliated.

They logged onto the Scrabble game site. It was Jonathon’s dream to one day get ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’ in Scrabble, his lifelong goal, the one thing that would let him die happy. He was beginning to think his dream was hopeless. Sara won. She got a double word score on ‘existential’.

“Nice one,” typed Jonathon.

“Thanks,” said Sara.

“Do you want to walk in parks?”

“Sure.”

They logged onto Second Life for a bit and walked in parks. They both had free trials that they kept uninstalling and reinstalling so their free trial was infinity. Second Life was stupid, but they kept registering for it for free. They kept going and walking in parks.

“I think I’m going to log off now,” typed Sara.

“Why?”

“Because I spend too much time on the internet.”

“No you don’t. I hardly ever see you these days.”

“That’s because I’m cutting back, Jon. I’m trying to walk in more parks in the city, the real city, you know … the one we live in. I’m trying to walk in less parks in Second Life.”

“Don’t be depressing. You don’t spend enough time on the internet. Look I’ve got about 6 hours left, don’t leave me yet.”

“Sorry Jon, I’m trying to quit. I spend too much time on the internet.”

“Everyone does. Its the 21st century. You have to.”

“Not everyone.”

“If you don't then you're out of touch.”

“My mom doesn't.”

”Your mom is out of touch. She probably still thinks otter videos are hilarious”

“Probably,” typed Sara. “She has a cell phone though, so she can't be that out of touch. I just talked with her a sec ago. It was her birf-day yesterday.”

“Does she have an iPhone though, Sara?”

“Nope, but there was a big discussion of the iPhone at the picnic I went to Saturday. In the real park. Everyone wants one except me. I don’t care. I'm not going to spend my life chasing the next gadget.”

“Maybe you're just out of touch. You need to spend more time on the internet, then you will want one for sure.”

“But I already spend all this time on the internet.”

“Not enough. Not enough to want an iPhone.”

“We can’t all be internet pioneers like you and spend 14-hours exploring the corners and nooks of the web.”

“You know what would be cool, Sara?”

“What?”

“If we were having this conversation over text messages on our brand-new iPhones.”

“If we had iPhones we could just call each other.”

“Don’t ruin my fantasy.”

“Goodbye, Jonathon I really have to go now. I can’t sit here any more. I am getting restless leg syndrome or something. AND! Stay away from Cindy’s page, you lurker.”

Sara signed off and Jonathon was alone. He sat there in the dark and looked up suddenly. The room was empty. There was no one there. It was like being underground, under a blanket, in a box. It was the kind of quiet, anxious emptiness that caved in and gave way to a creeping, sneaking, ugly dread. He expected a man in a mask of human leather to tear into his room with a chainsaw. His intention would be to carve off Jonathon’s face so he could wear it. Maybe his old mask was getting moldy or something? Jonathon didn’t know. But he was alone. The door stayed shut. No chainsaw-wielding maniac tore him apart. He was just alone.

He ate a ho-ho and a coke. He felt like the only person left in the entire world, hiding in a basement from the bombs. He felt like the only person in the world, standing in the sand before the light rose and swam over the face of the World, before the animals and the plants had even been dreamt up by some late, great slumbering God. He got up to take a piss. The lights in the other room were on and it took a minute for his eyes to adjust, leaving trails and streaks behind his eyelids. Rich was watching porn on the big-screen. Jonathon was still in his underwear. Rich looked at him, then looked back at a huge penis entering a huge vagina. Now Jonathon wished he was the last human left alive, hiding in a basement.

In the bathroom Jonathon saw a huge turd floating in the toilet.

“God fucking damn it,” Jonathon said. He pulled Rich’s toothbrush out of the medicine cabinet, put it in the sink and pissed in the sink. He picked the toothbrush up with some toilet-paper, shook it off and put it back in the cabinet.

Rich looked at him again as he came out of the bathroom.

“I didn’t hear the toilet flush,” he said.

“Neither did I,” Jonathon said and went back in his room. He closed the door. It was dark and he almost tripped over his shoes lying in the middle of the floor. He wished he had a pet monkey that could hang-glide. That would be awesome. That would be fucking amazing. He was starting to wish he had kept the surrealist story from fake Chris. He probably could have changed a few things and gotten it published somewhere as his own story. He could start a whole career on it, a whole industry of surrealist books and stories based almost entirely on the nonsense spam that no one reads. “Ingenious Forks Favor Mao’s Blanket Bank” would be an international bestseller, on par with the DaVinci Code but only half as bad.

Jonathon checked Cindy’s page again, nothing new. He checked "Thumpster tha #1 Stunna's" page again. What an asshole.

He checked his email again. More penis pill emails.

He crawled back in bed and pulled the blanket over his head and buried his face in the mattress. He hugged his chest, he breathed his own breath. He realized he hadn’t brushed his teeth or showered today. He didn’t care. He didn’t care because the internet was a place you didn’t need to shower, the internet was a place you didn’t need to brush your teeth or trim your nose hair, or shave your pubes, or even make small-talk. The internet was a place that was hidden behind bricks and wires and tubes and motors, hidden behind whole continents and tiny pebbles. The internet stretched across fields, across visible spectrums, it lived in towers where the wind howled like an animal, where the wind climbed inside you, climbed inside your lungs and stole your breath right out from the inside of you. The internet was place that lived in blank white rooms filled with echoes and alarms and angry resentment. It was a place that hid in the back of your mind and crawled out every few days like a crab clawing its way painfully to the top, through the sand and debris of thought, right up to the front of your mind to scream its disgust and desire and dreams at you, to scream your own ideas lost to the uncounted, unwanted years, to scream forgotten memories back at you, to scream your life’s ambition into your face before it retreated silently back to its hole with all your thoughts in a tightly-clutched little bag. The internet was a place, the internet was a place filled with holes and hiding places like Afghanistan, the internet was a place where it was always freezing cold and you were always stunningly alone, sweepingly adrift like the nomads of Inner Mongolia, the internet was a place that was frightening and terrifying and primal, filled with red skulls and sullen murder like the blackened jungles of deep Cambodia.

The internet was a place that was in this very room with him. Jonathon didn’t need a chainsaw murderer to come chomping into his room in a haze of gasoline smoke and adenoidal rage because the internet was already doing that job and doing it very well. The internet was sitting in the chair he had just been in and it was whispering effigies, whispering elegies, and it was watching him under his blanket, watching Jonathon as he hugged his chest and buried his face and mourned every wasted moment, it was watching his twitches and his sorrows and regrets, it was watching everything, every facial expression, every tick and muscle movement, it was watching it all.

It was watching with its single, enormous, roving eye and it smiled with teeth that weren't there.