Fakebook (32 page)

“Donate? I'm paying you! What happened to the one you brought on your interview?”

“It's at home…with the shirt I wore that day, too…”

“Just bring it tomorrow. Come on, I'll show you to your desk.”

I follow him in a bit of a daze, trying to process what I'd just learned—attempting to figure out how this fit into the vision of building an art department that I was sold on.

We walked past the large conference room I was interviewed in and past a dozen cubicles in the quiet, early morning office. We turned a corner and walked down a small hallway.

“Welcome,” Freddy said, “to LiveWired.”

“Is this storage?” I asked.

“What? No.”

I couldn't believe what I saw—it was like I'd stepped into an office-themed episode of
Hoarders
.

The room was cramped and overflowing with boxed and unboxed crap—every kind of cheap garbage merchandise you could imagine—from pocket knives to fake leather wallets to those computer mice that drew me to the gig. Mounds and mounds of inventory were piled onto shelves, in bins, in freestanding drawers, on desks, and on the floor. It was less an office than a Dumpster.

“This is the office?” I asked again. “Then what did we just walk through?”

“That's another company. We rent this space from them.”

It was four days until my Facebook confession, but I suddenly began to question if my real life should be public again.

“I didn't realize…”

“It's fine. Here's your desk.” Freddy waved his arms toward a precariously stacked pile of LiveWired-brand iPad “armor” cases. I carefully walked toward it, afraid too hard a step would cause an avalanche of accessories. I took a deep breath and began to stack them in some semblance of order and structural integrity.

After careful excavation, I found the tabletop and sat down at my chair—promptly banging my knees and causing an empty armor case to fall three and a half feet onto the floor, cracking on impact with the soft carpet.

“Careful!” Freddy blurted out. “I can't have you breaking all of our samples!”

“Sorry! I banged my knees on something.” I looked under my desk to discover it wasn't a desk at all. It was a bookshelf. And I banged my knees because bookshelves have shelves.

Soon after I removed a bunch of LiveWired keyboards to give myself a small cavity in which to place my legs, one of my new coworkers arrived. He was setting up a laptop on the bookshelf next to mine.

“Hi, I'm Dave,” I said, still clinging to my “first day at camp” enthusiasm. “The new designer.”

“Hi, I'm James,” he responded somewhat meekly. We reached over a pile of computer mice stacked between our shelves and shook hands. “Head of product development.”

“Oh great!” I said. “We'll probably be doing a lot of work together.”

“Let's hope so,” he said. He hands me the power cord to his Dell. “Do you mind plugging this in?”

“Sure,” I said. “Is that a PC? I was hoping we'd be on Macs. That's what I'm used to.”

“I'll be on a Mac soon,” he said. “I'm saving up.”

It was Thursday night, and my first week at LiveWired was almost over.

I decided to walk home after our product review meeting—the full forty blocks and eight avenues. It didn't feel sufficient to decompress from that crystallization of my new company.

How to explain it…

You know how, near the checkout line at a T. J. Maxx, you'll see the world's crappiest pocket knife packaged with the world's crappiest binoculars and, like, a carabiner? And they'd call it something like “Extreme Outdoor Adventure Kit,” and they'd sell it for $7.99, and your grandma would buy it for you, and it'd ruin your birthday?

These were the people responsible for that product.

It was a knock-off firm. They'd buy something that exists, send it to a factory in China, and make a lower-quality version of it. It was the opposite of creativity. It was theft.

And the whole thing wasn't just disheartening but degrading.

During the meeting, Freddy began clapping his fingers into his palm. It was only after he increased in speed that I realized it was the “gimmie” motion of an infant. I got up, walked a few steps toward him, and nudged a flashlight a few inches toward his flapping fingers.

You just felt…humiliated.

Somewhere around Thompson Square Park, the weight of my personal laptop began to pinch my shoulder.

“We'll discuss it next week,” Freddy had said to me today when I told him I wouldn't bring my computer in indefinitely. “But if we buy you the computer, you can provide your own software, right? I don't care if you steal it.”

Freddy and I had a lot to discuss—including a ten-thousand-dollar salary discrepancy.

This whole thing was an epic disaster. It wasn't like I could be happy just to have a job—I'd had a job. And I quit it because Freddy convinced me this was a better opportunity.

And now I realized that the qualities I'd found so endearing when I was interviewing—that he was so quick to tell people that he “never tells a lie,” and why he could so proudly handle people calling him “a piece of shit”—had a simple explanation. Practice. He'd had lots and lots of practice.

I tried to briefly forget about it. Tomorrow was Friday. And Friday was my birthday.

And tonight…well, tonight was April Fools' Day. And that meant I had something important to do.

With a sore shoulder and a coffee shop across the street, I decide this was as good a spot as any to confess the Fakebook fraud. So I grabbed a coffee and sat down at a table. I pulled out my laptop. Lifting the screen woke it from sleep mode and presented me with the LiveWired files I'd been working on. An intense frustration swelled up in me. I closed my eyes tightly and inhaled.

So this is it, I thought to myself. This is my penance.

I'd fooled my friends and family into believing I was on the move—and at the end of it, I was fooled into moving. Like Fake Dave, I even ended up in a place without computers.

I closed the window with LiveWired work and opened the Word doc I've been preparing for the past week.

This was the moment I'd been dreading for half a year, but also one I'd been looking forward to. This was the moment when I could finally rejoin my community—when I could rejoin the world and reclaim my reputation. This was where I no longer had to pretend my life was this “leap-before-you-look” disaster.

Except now it actually was.

Served me right for believing something I read on the Internet.

But I didn't post it…not yet. I sat there, looking out the window toward Thompson Square Park at dusk, with my cursor hovering over the Submit button and my index finger over the Enter key.

It was a feeling I was familiar with but still not quite used to. This confession was floating in limbo—it both had already happened and was still to come. But this time, the feelings of nervousness and embarrassment and fear of judgment from my audience—my friends, my Facebook friends, my family, my old colleagues—faded into something else.

Six months ago, when my finger first lingered over the Enter key, and just before I gave the first words of Fakebook life and allowed them to broadcast to the news feeds of an unsuspecting audience, I'd had no notion of the consequences of what I was about to do. I didn't think about the people I'd have to avoid or the feelings I'd hurt. I didn't consider the places I couldn't go and the events I couldn't take part in. I didn't consider the many hours a week I would be devoting to my second life, or how I'd have to be ever vigilant of exposure.

I was also completely ignorant to how intertwined my real life and my online persona were—of how much of what was on that screen was actually a part of me. I underestimated how impactful our separation would be and didn't consider what it meant to be estranged from my community—a community which would make me into an undeserving folk hero. I didn't realize how it would complicate old relationships, and what an obstacle it would be in trying to form new ones.

And I certainly never imagined it would change lives.

But now I had experienced it. I had told Elliott that what makes Fakebook interesting is the total separation of real and fake life. I was wrong. That's impossible to do. In truth, that was me up on people's walls. It was the side of me that likes to push things—that challenges authority and assumptions. Fake Dave was a compilation of various sides of me, many of which I thought I had discarded for the sake of growing up.

But in truth, those sides of me were just an Enter key away. Pressing down would end this and reconnect my selves on both sides of the screen. We'd both blindly leaped into a disaster, and not for the first time. But for all Fake Dave's flaws, he's always had the guts to leap again. And that was a quality I needed again.

So I pushed Enter.