Note to Self
ALINA SIMONE
For Joshua
Table of Contents
1
Time theft. This was Anna’s first thought when she found out she was being let go. Everyone was doing it—Brandon was practically webcasting gay porn from his cube—but for some reason management had decided to unleash the mailbox scrubbers and digital hounds on her. Worse, she couldn’t deny it. The Internet had draped itself, kudzu-like, over her brain. There were disturbing signs. Or rather, signs that Leslie later pointed out were disturbing. Like the spam collection. “Spam’s not a collectible,” Leslie had said when Anna laid her confession on the table. “That’s not a thing, Anna.” And Anna had to explain because Leslie didn’t know what it was like out there—her floors were cleaned by tiny robots with cute names. Market brinksmanship had driven spammers to new poetic heights. Someone should be saving it, studying it, sorting it according to some matrix of desperation, even.
“‘Tiny bubbles of discontent surround me because I’m as lonely as a shark in the deep blue ocean.’” Anna quoted from a Ukrainian escort’s solicitation she’d rescued from the filters. “Don’t you think that’s kind of beautiful?”
“Don’t you have better things to do than read spam?” Leslie countered.
That assumption, Anna had to admit, was debatable.
Of course, when Anna was called into Mr. Brohaurt’s office, she felt ill at the thought he’d discovered her little Kunstkammer of spam. Only four years older, Chad Brohaurt made forty times her annual salary and could cleave the Earth with his jawline. There was some incredibly filthy stuff in there, things she’d felt obligated to include for the sake of completeness. Sitting on his couch of real leather, she had the urge to confess, explain that she always started off clicking on something perfectly reasonable. Then one thing led to another and before she knew it, whoops! down the rabbit hole. Only it wasn’t a “rabbit hole” was it? “Rabbit hole” implied someplace whimsical and fun, an enchanting place where you could enjoy weapons-grade cocktails with a well-dressed rodent. The Internet was more like an asshole. An asshole whispering of African fruits with miraculous weight-loss properties and discounted mani-pedis in some forlorn section of Queens.
It turned out her dismissal from Pinter, Chinski and Harms had nothing to do with time theft, though. Mr. Brohaurt had sat down by the window, put a sad hand on the knee of his expensive pants. “This has nothing to do with you, Anna,” he’d said. “Everyone’s getting a haircut.” And Anna had stupidly looked out at Madison Avenue, curious about the new haircut. Of course, he’d meant budget cuts and the other white-shoe law firms. The new austerity. The end of everything.
But that was five weeks ago, and now here was Leslie’s voice calling her back to their “sesh” like the gentle chime of a laptop rebooting.
“Thirty-seven is not the end,” she was saying. “It’s really just the middle.”
Anna had taken Leslie up on her offer reluctantly. In general, she felt pretty ambivalent about time spent offline. With other people she always ended up pretending to be someone else, someone more like them. Whereas alone with the Internet, she was totally herself. There were no vagaries. She clicked on exactly what she felt like clicking on and each click defined her. Even the spam. Especially the spam. Besides, what kind of person needed a life coach? Of course, Leslie wasn’t a real Life Coach, but she was a consultant at McKinsey, which trafficked in all the same theories, or so she had assured her. But to her surprise, Anna found herself looking forward to the ritual. They met on Sundays at Café Gowanus, which she liked even though it was built on a Superfund site. The café was as clean and bright as the Apple store it might well have been, full of ambitious people with hyphenated jobs and nice clothes, hunched over their MacBooks. It was as though the sugar packets had all been secretly filled with Adderall; just being in the room gave her a charge. Each week, Leslie armed Anna with a variety of motivational sayings—Reposition Your Disposition, Negativity Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy—cranks to power her way toward a new life. It hadn’t exactly worked out that way. For now, her weeks were still powered by Triscuits and the Web, but she enjoyed the security of Leslie’s firm hand on the rudder.
“Did you think about what we talked about last time?” Leslie said.
“Yes,” Anna said, remembering only that last time they had talked about