The Brooklyn Rail

Why not close out the year with the interiority of an incel heated to a rolling boil and transformed into an active shooter? If you like, think of it as someone putting Tom Waits’s “Little Drop of Poison” on the jukebox. The menacing, ersatz Travis Bickle narrating this cold open is the voice of the toxic online “streets” in Justin Taylor’s novel Reboot, out in paperback by Vintage this month. Taylor’s novel is Frankensteinian in that it attempts to gather strange, monstrous limbs of contemporary life—reptilian and hollow earth conspiracies, the manosphere, BoJack Horseman, Twitch streaming, QAnon, celebrity and its corresponding fandom—and reanimate the corpse of popular culture. It's also Young Frankensteinian in that the book never takes itself too seriously, even though the characters think nothing could be more grave than their particular hardships. In this way, Reboot is brilliant satire in the DeLillo mode. Taylor is one of the few unapologetic stylists out there, and whether he’s following protagonist David Crader’s hard reset or chronicling environmental collapse, every sentence is written with great care.

***

Logging off for the last time, and shouldn’t it feel like something? Maybe it does. It feels like dry, aching eyes. Bright screens in dark rooms, room really. Just one room. Room and screen, singular, because there have been many over the dreary years, but they have narrowed to these. This screen and this room. This screen and this room are what he leaves behind.

Okay, two screens if you count the phone.

Three if you include the handheld gaming console. He doesn’t count the console.

Hasn’t owned a TV in years. He streams what he needs, which is nothing now.

Two screens, one room. That’s funny. Like that old video, the horrendous OG meme. Did we use that word yet? He was a kid. Dad saw the clip before he did, blue light in the other room, door ajar, wouldn’t show it to him. What are you laughing at? Get the hell out of here. Learn to knock. It didn’t matter. He found it on his own soon enough. He looked and looked and looked for more and found it. If you were into origin myths—he isn’t—you might find one here. The look on Dad’s face in screen light, the barked command to leave…A primal scene, perhaps. The formal Freudian derangement. But isn’t that supposed to be, you know, Mom and Dad…

Can it be the primal scene if what he saw was Dad in front of the computer, alone?

Because every earlier generation caught the parents in the act. The old two-backed beast (Is that Shakespeare? Is that literally in fucking Shakespeare? LOL.) but this was different. Advent of a new modality, or it felt that way at the time. Glitch in the matrix. And Dad wasn’t doing anything. Zipped up, he was just disgusted. Disgusted and enraptured and caught by his son. In the act of watching. It wasn’t the image on the screen so much as the screen itself. Blue light burning in the dark of Dad’s office. After he moved out, his own bedroom became Mom’s sewing room. Later (not that much later) he had to move back home: a failure, flameout, incel in everything but name and, yeah, okay, maybe, on certain boards, he even goes by that name, too. Went by. Dad’s retired, doesn’t need an office. Mom still sews, of course, but never mind. You see the point? That room with the blue light, the site of the primal scene, that’s this room. The one where he’s been living. The one he’s leaving now.

The computer sighs itself to silence. Goodbye, user. Good night, cooling fan. Good night, screen. The phone vibrates once and then goes black. He leaves the phone on the bedside table, then thinks better, puts it under the pillow like a tooth. If Mom pops in to check and sees it there, turned off and him gone, she’ll know. He doesn’t know exactly what she’ll know, but she’ll know something. Anything. Not worth it. He fixes the pillows. He makes the bed because if he doesn’t, she will, and if she does…

How many times have we seen this scene before? IRL and on-screen, like there’s any difference. It’s so cliché, so portentous, so—easy. Lone loser with a gun prowling the anonymous American night. As gimmicks go, it’s cheap, and only barely justifiable at this late date in the history of narrative, the decline of prestige television. One justification is that the guy and his gun are a pretext, a point of entry, for a story about something else. But isn’t even that move a little hackneyed now? You can’t do it without self-awareness. The gesture contains its own ironized wink.

So be it, he thinks. Wink.

The pistol heavy in the pocket of his jacket. It’s a warm night, but not as bad as the last few days. The big storm broke the heat wave, but it’s still too muggy for this jacket. He knows that he sticks out, but also that nobody is watching. He has three old MetroCards in his jeans pocket. Will one of them have fare? He’s been using hands-free payment for months now, but of course he would need his phone for that. Or a credit card. He doesn’t have one of those.

The second MetroCard has seventeen dollars on it. Miracle. He swipes through the turnstile. Fourteen and something left. Whatever the numbers on the readout read. There’s a guy playing guitar on the platform, finishing up the Eagles’ “Take It Easy” (he thinks of the Lebowski joke—who wouldn’t?) and then plinking over into Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life),” sappy classic heavily ironized by circumstance, like something that the Jew Coen brothers might put on the soundtrack in a scene like this one in a movie about a guy like him. Not that anyone would make a movie about a guy like him. Except maybe someone will now. Loner loser gone to glory, “embrace infamy,” like Ron Watkins used to say. Not the Jew Coens, this isn’t for them. But someone could do a reboot of Natural Born Killers about him, that’d be cool, except he isn’t interested in mass death, still less in spectacle. Spectacle is inevitable but subsidiary. He doesn’t want to be on big screens and chyrons, breaking news updates, push notifications. We interrupt this program. Or he does want that stuff, but not badly. He could take it or leave it. Or rather, takes it as a given. He wants to be on threads and channels, message boards, DMs. He wants to be on small screens, blue light burning out of scratched-glass faces, devices held in damp hands of men breathing heavily alone in darkened rooms.

Also, his violence is not random. He knows who he wants to kill and why.

It feels like a retro gesture, this having a target. To break with the venerable 2010s tradition of ideologically motivated mass death.

He has his ideologies, sure, but they’ve got nothing to do with this. This is more about affiliation. Fandom. What it means to be part of something.

Mark David Chapman has a posse.

Or what it would have been like if he did.

Maybe the singer on the platform is playing “Time of Your Life” as a gag. The gag being that he’s doing it so straight-faced. The joke being that this isn’t a joke at all. Anyway, the train’s here. He considers flipping the MetroCard into the open guitar case, pockets it instead. He’d rather see it wasted than put to use.

A father and daughter huddled around a Speak & Spell. Slumped-over office drones, or maybe they’re in retail. Guys in beige suits and women in sheer tights, kitten heels. Some fat-titted bitch in a Barnard T-shirt and plaid skirt. Cosplaying schoolgirl porn, maybe actual slut. The pistol in his pocket. What he’d say on the message board about a photo of her versus the way he casts his eyes down to the floor of the subway car rather than meet her not entirely unwelcoming gaze. Some girls don’t mind being noticed. Truth to tell, that scares him more. He’s not bad-looking, not that much older than she is, probably. Maybe they’ve read some of the same books. He’s pretty well-read, though these days he does—did—most of his reading online, which he knows isn’t the same, but it’s not necessarily worse, right, and maybe in some ways it’s better. An emergent modality, the scrolling, direct access to content and a blessed absence of gatekeepers, middlemen, censors—but maybe that’s true of her, too, this bitch crossing and uncrossing her legs, fine blond hairs on her bare knees like in Lolita.

See? He reads.

She exits at 116th, walks right by him. The wash of her scent as she scrolls past, his eyes still on the floor, tracing patterns in the red-and-black mottle like you’d look for animal shapes in the clouds. Still sort of weird to be riding on here without a mask.

The train fills up as it trundles south. Mostly he is bored. No phone means no posting, no podcasts. Also, no music, though he stopped listening to music awhile back, which was when he really realized how fucked he was, not that he did anything about it. His life was just some train he was riding, might as well have been this one, and now it is. He stays standing even though there are seats open. Standing is something to do.

It’s unbearable, this reality. This being and standing, unmediated, screenless, nothing to do but feel your toes sweat in your socks and listen to yourself think. The whole point of the internet is to never be alone. This is especially important if you are, like he is, always alone. Parents don’t count. Job, when he had a job, didn’t count.

Nothing counts.

Times Square Forty-Second Street. The flood of disembarking tourists, workers, people trying to transfer. The counter-throng of boarders pressing in at the edges of the doors. Down the platform, up the stairs, elbow to elbow, breath on necks. Some people still have masks on. They’ll never take them off. Some people never get over shit; they can’t move on. Someone is going to say that about him when this is over, he knows it. That he was fixated, that he was stuck in the past. It isn’t true. Here he is in forward motion, taking determined, irreversible steps. No backtracking. Cool metal in warm pocket. No pussing out (as Dad would have said, as he often said). No manifesto, or not one of his own. It’ll all be obvious after. Wholly legible. Fatties with rubbed-raw dicks will post on trad forums to sanctify his name. God-tier, they’ll say. We stan a true king.

He’s not trying to make a mark. He’s trying to erase one. He’s only trolling a fandom. It’s a venerable tradition, his by right, the only inheritance to which he feels heir. If there were a way to pull this off without leaving his bedroom, without logging off, he would have. He might have. On the other hand, fuck these people and fuck himself, too. Fuck my life, he thinks giddily. It feels so good to say the words. Fuck this fandom and fuck their dreams. He’s only sorry that he’ll be too dead to see how hard they’re being dunked on.

GamerGate due for a reboot.

He watched the HBO Q doc, and the other one. Seemed sad, more than anything. How you can blow up the whole world and still just be this bored loser living in a small room, checking your feeds.

North to Forty-Seventh Street, then over to Ninth Ave. Too early, still. Go to the water first. Walk to the river and back.

City streets are boring. Tourists are boring. New York is boring. Life, friends, is boring.

Learn to knock.

Wind on the water. Joggers on the path. Weight on one side of the jacket. Long light to cross back over the West Side Highway. Music coming from bars. The military stillness of the bank kiosks. Pigeons group and scatter. Someone screaming about something, somewhere not far off, maybe a few floors up. Fresh pizza, a slamming door. He’s no longer bummed out that this feels like nothing. Only simps crave significance. LOLZ are better. The thing to understand is that meaning itself is a cultural hyperstition. He had to look that word up the first time he saw it in a post. What it means is, like, the reverse of a superstition, i.e., something a lot of people believe even though it isn’t true. But then—he loves this—the thing that isn’t true becomes true once enough people believe in it. That’s what meaning means to him. The truth is a false flag operation. Reality is an inside job.

He’s hot, tired, getting hungry, running late. But not too late, he’s pretty sure. He walks a little faster. Not too much faster. Not an all-out run.

Take it easy. Have the time of your life. Is it time for some game theory? A flick to free the safety. Closing hot fingers around trigger and grip. The normies will find deep meaning where there is none. Meaning is their addiction, their weakness, their libtard fantasy. He’s going out on top, that’s all. On a high note, like George Costanza or Jeffrey Epstein. That’s funny. Too bad he can’t post it. Hand coming out of pocket as he steps into the circle of light. Mostly he’s looking forward to never again being bored.