Sometimes I am boggled by the gallery of souls I’ve known. By the lore. The wild history, unsung. People crowd in and talk to me in dreams. People who died or disappeared or whose connection to my own life makes no logical sense, but exists, as strong as ever, in a past that seeps and stains instead of fading.
Rachel Kushner
My first thought upon reading this was of a middle school classmate of mine, the child of a champion poker player, who died of a heroin overdose. He was an object of affection traded among the blondes, and I found it unfair that he was in honors algebra, too. I thought at the time that he was a bit of a bully, but I think now that I just didn’t expect a pretty boy like him to want to banter with me and my Coke-bottle glasses. Then I stopped thinking of him for several years, until his death was mourned by one of the blondes with whom I was friends on Facebook, though surely we’d never been friends in life.
I thought then of another classmate of mine who died young several years after the last time I saw him. He had become a valet at one of the casinos on the Strip — we all grew up in Las Vegas — but what I remembered of him was that it was rumored that his family had an elevator in their house, and that his father had died in a private plane crash when we were in the third grade.
I wonder if I thought of the valet and the poker player’s son because they’re people I knew from Las Vegas who could only have been from Las Vegas. That quote is from one of those extremely New Yorker essays about pre-Patagonia vests San Francisco, where everyone had blue hair and moonlighted as a sex worker. I’ve known a lot of people but most of them aren’t metonyms for where they’re from. Most of the people I know are a little boring, like me, though if you pick out the right details anyone’s a character. (My college roommate liked to introduce me to people as “the dancer from Las Vegas.”)
I can’t remember if I used to dream about people I haven’t seen in years as often as I do these days. It’s been seven months since I last saw a friend in person. Bleak, yeah? There’s no proof my friends still have legs. Maybe it’s just me and the people who also shop at my local Waitrose who still have legs, and everyone else is just a head and a bit of torso floating up into the Zoom window.
After the Capital riots I stopped checking Instagram. I can only take so much moralizing into the void, and I had already begun to feel that two-dimensional people were empty calories, but now my other Chrome tabs are a yoga video on YouTube and the Wikipedia entry for “Nihilism.”
There’s not much left to learn from Instagram anymore, anyway. I’ve watched all the bloggers frost cakes, and I know that every boy from the Becker Middle School class of 2003 who isn’t dead went to college in Reno and became a financial advisor. (The girls are cosmetologists. One or two of them dropped out of ASU.)
Yesterday I told my best friend — who I haven’t seen in thirteen months — that I’ve been fantasizing about landing at Newark. Newark! Newark is a metaphor for fantasizing about seeing my loved ones in three dimensions again, but it’s easier to picture handing my passport to an American customs officer for the first time in a year than it is to picture reuniting with people who I suspect might not have legs anymore.
My ten-year college reunion was canceled. Or, rather, moved online, but come on. I don’t need to start wondering if all of those people are legless now, too.
I turned over this week’s Economist because I can’t stand to look at another photo of Trump, and on the back was that ad they keep running from some godforsaken cybersecurity company — another cybersecurity company, they’re a dime a dozen and yet the Russians have still read more of my last year’s tax return than I ever did — with two photos of young hotties captioned “One of these people doesn’t exist.”
The problem with Instagram is that you shouldn’t get to open Schrödinger’s box. Let the gallery of souls talk to me only in dreams; don’t let me learn that one of these people doesn’t exist and the other works for Merrill Lynch in Reno. I think it would be nice to be surprised, in a season or a year or a decade when we can sneeze on each other again, to learn that someone has had a baby or moved to Los Angeles or had another baby or moved back to Los Angeles, and I can feel sorry for them instead of resenting their having traveled home for Christmas in 2020.
The problem without Instagram is that I’m really not sure anyone still exists. If I swiped my hand at the people in front of me in line at the grocery checkout, would it pass through like Moaning Myrtle? Is it Malicious AI texting me back? These are convenient excuses for me to put away the books and return to watching Deb Perelman slice garlic in hyperlapse. But if no one exists, then why do I keep responding to work emails? (I’ve been trying to use this excuse to quit washing my hair, too, but I can only make it five days before the grease does me in.)
I couldn’t make it through the Wikipedia entry on nihilism, but I’m pretty sure Nietzsche never took a position on the aesthetic utility of half-assed movies about the pandemic we’re currently in, so I’ll have to look elsewhere. Anyway, it seems like Anne Hathaway still has legs, so there’s that.
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