Meatspace (15 page)

I got on a train and returned home. At home, I threw myself into writing, which meant I promptly checked my email and got lost in a slurry of job alerts, press releases of books and songs I’d never bother with, and Facebook and Twitter notifications, which I deleted to keep me at inbox zero. I thought about setting up a Tumblr called Vincent Van Gok Wan, where I would superimpose Gok Wan glasses onto Van Gogh self-portraits. I’d have to learn how to use Photoshop.

No one else had contacted me. I didn’t dare visit any social networking sites in case Kitab 2 was following me – certainly nothing that betrayed my movements or my feelings at my abandonment of another human being in their time of need.

The flat feels empty without Aziz, and dealing with Kitab 2 makes me feel like I’ve lost the day. I send Aziz an email he’ll probably not bother replying to. Sitting here with my own space returned to me, with the coffee pot still wringing juice from its beans, with the slow caress of Smog playing on the speakers, I feel nothing.

By the time the evening comes, I realise I haven’t spoken to anyone since leaving Kitab 2 at the university. I have forgotten how to communicate. I log into Facebook and look up my name.

Guilt has made me think I will add Kitab 2 on Facebook after all. We can be electronic friends and when he has his own life here with his own space and his own friends we can moot a drink that will never happen. My way of apologising for abandoning him when he passed out is to add him on Facebook so we can be electronic friends. This is the barest minimum of friendships now. It’s a peace offering though.

I find something bizarre when I look him up.

The search results display 3 results. One is me – I recognise it because I have recently taken off the option to see my list of friends or add me as a friend. Also, the photograph is a picture I took of a window display involving my novel amongst 3 of my heroes that someone sent me from their local bookshop. There’s a fan page my publisher set up, that has a pathetic 40 ‘likes’, pretty much all of them being my family apart from someone I met at a wedding, who ‘liked’ the page in front of me, during the speeches to show how impressed he was that I was a writer. And there’s Kitab 2. Except I can’t see Kitab 2. Only another profile that has my picture as its avatar. It’s the ‘official’ me photograph that Aziz took outside a restaurant, against the ubiquitous brick wall of creatives who want to appear urban and edgy. Which is how I would define myself.

Why is there another me on Facebook? How is that? I click on it. Have I been cloned?

The information listed is bare. It has a name only. No age, no likes or dislikes. Just the name. My name. And a map, which shows London and Bangalore as the last places this account has been.

Kitab 2.

The cock-end.

He has taken down his photo, the one that looks like a scan of a driver’s licence photographed on a camera phone, and put my photo up, a press shot he must have got off Google.

I pace the flat weighing up the facts. I play Flappy Bird violently. Is identity theft worse than abandonment? I left him in a corridor passed out when I could have helped him or at least checked if he was okay. What he’s done, well, if I was actually famous, like Kanye-famous, would be de rigueur for a namesake. If I was called Brad Pitt, I’d probably have a photo of Brad Pitt as my avatar. Standard operating procedure.

But this, this isn’t right. I’m an individual. I’m myself. I’m the only me. So for him to do this, it counts as identity theft. People could be searching for me and finding him. He could be putting up all kinds of rubbish on his timeline, in my name.

I’m the only me there is.

Angry, I write a message to him, not knowing how else to confront him but when I read it back, it feels garbled and silly, an overreaction. How dare you use a photo of me instead of a photo of you online? What kind of person are you? You arsehole, you dick. All the insults. On re-reading, I feel silly for even being annoyed about it. It’s not like he’s stolen my passport or anything. I don’t send the message.

I stand up and walk around the flat, working out my best appropriate response because this shouldn’t go unnoted.

When I’ve finished pacing the study, I come back to my computer and stare at Kitab 2 masquerading as me. I click onto my news feed. There’s nothing else to do. I click on the private messages and decide to plough through them as a distraction. I have 17. 10 of them are invitations to events, reminders of birthday parties and announcements of news. 5 of them are the remnants of Facebook chats I got bored of and checked out of, meaning the messages ended up in my inbox. It’s a mixture of ‘see you later’ and ‘xxx’ and so can be ignored.

But, there, second to top, is a message from Kitab 2. I look at the time it’s been sent. It was sent 2 hours ago.

2 hours ago when I was staring blankly at a Word document, at where I left off some work a few days ago, trying my hardest to summon up the impetus to write what was in my brain. Kitab 2 is fine! I think while my computer thinks and loads up the message.

It says:

Dude,

Uncool. I thought we were going to be friends. I only wanted to be like my namesake, dude. You are the coolest, dude. But today, that was uncool, dude.

Xoxo The Real Kitab

What does he mean, The Real Kitab? The rest of it is understandable, a semi-peace offering but understandably annoyed given how I abandoned him up at his university. But The Real Kitab? The Real Kitab wouldn’t hide behind an avatar of someone else. I want to message him and ask about the photo calmly now. Instead of angrily. Inside though, I feel rage, an unmitigating fiery burn of desperate need to unload on the internet. I look at the clock. I have been on my computer for hours. I have achieved nothing.

My brain is wrapped in circles. I can’t think. I miss Aziz. This is a time when I need his unwanted unburdened-by-self-consciousness advice. The best I can do is log off and pull my laptop shut. I look at the time. My chest is tight and burning, with nerves. I don’t know why I feel nervous. I crouch down in a squat to help me breathe.

I check Twitter. Nothing is happening. My last tweet: ‘Dudes, I’m alive’ – I don’t even remember writing it.

I look up at the time. I head to the pub.

Mitch’s take on the whole situation is clear: ‘If you sign up for one of those social networking sites, you deserve everything you get. You know he’s probably a spy. For Google. Or the CIA. Either/or. It’s all the same. It all sounds a bit much for you at the moment, doesn’t it?’

Mitch doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I tell him. ‘Mitch, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Don’t I? Looks to me like you’ve got yourself into a pickle of shit. A shit pickle. A shit pickle of your own doing. People are always tweeting their breakfasts or telling the world they’re mildly annoyed about something. What about books, Kit? What about phone calls? Whatever happened to watching the flicks at the pictures and not the telly on the phone? I tell you something, I like things. I like books and I like vinyl and I love privacy.’ There’s a spot on Mitch’s head that he always rubs, up and to the right of his crown. I asked him once if that was why he was going bald and he shook me by my lapels angrily.

‘You’re a dinosaur.’

‘And Google is my asteroid, my friend.’

I go on Twitter but I’m kicked out of the app. I reload it and it signs me back in. Mitch sighs. I check my follower count. I check my interactions – none. I check my last tweet, ‘Girls like writers. Where are my groupies, dudes?’ I don’t remember writing that. Mitch grabs my phone from me and puts it on the bar.

‘Be in the room, Kit,’ he growls.

‘Sorry,’ I say. I’m confused. I saw the screen so quickly maybe it didn’t say what I thought it did. ‘What you reading at the moment?’

‘Oh, man,’ Mitch says. ‘What am I not reading? If I’m not eating, I’m reading. Sometimes both at the same time.’ I want to look at my phone. ‘A collection of Don DeLillo short stories.’

I’ve never read Don DeLillo, which goes against every single interview I’ve ever done, all of which cite him as a hero. The books are too long. I don’t have the patience. What’s wrong with blogs documenting canapés and Tumblrs about the career of my childhood crush, Gillian Anderson? While Mitch orders our next round, I pick my phone up off the bar and check Twitter. I find myself with an influx of followers and new @-replies.

‘LOLZ – your cock’s tiny.’

‘Hahahahahaha – your books are cock and bull stories. Shame your cock isn’t.’

‘Bro, y r u so prverted.’

‘SEX PEST AUTHOR. SEX PEST AUTHOR. SEX PEST AUTHOR.’

Mitch looks at me and notices my frown of confusion.

‘Checking your phone again. God, what now? Someone telling you what they had for dinner?’

Why are all my followers calling me a sex pest or commenting on my penis? I check my @-replies all the way down to someone I know. It’s Hayley (@Hayleyspen on Twitter). It was 20 minutes and 40 @-replies ago.

‘
Oh, chico … WTF?!’

I view the entire conversation. According to my timeline, I tweeted 20 minutes ago (while I was being berated for all of modern life’s sins by Mitch) saying, ‘My penis is bigger and better than my books’ with a link to a twitpic.

I know what it is. I can’t bear to confirm what it is. I know what it is.

I have to see what it is.

I click on the picture. Mitch is harrumphing, opening up an old paperback he’s brought with him. The picture loads. I wait. The minutes build up, we’re all slowly dying waiting for things to load on our phones.

It’s a close-up of a flaccid brown penis. More ball than shaft. More curve than straight. And hairy, like a Jimi Hendrix picture, wild, thick and unkempt. Like a yeti with a long nose.

I pinch in till it blurs then out again.

Is this me? Did I do this?

It’s definitely not mine. I keep a trim perimeter. My stomach burns. I feel a cold sweat.

I pull my fingers apart on the screen to zoom in and examine all the contours of the penis. It is very brown, browner than the thighs at the fringes of the photo. The hair is thick and wild. The Jimi Hendrix comparison still stands. The penis droops to the left and into a point, like the end of an elephant’s trunk, except the foreskin has been pulled up over the end. It looks vacuum-sealed.

It hits me. I get a flash of a waddling bottomless brown man.

I flash back to Kitab 2’s penis, adding a ‘Toaster’ filter from Instagram to the memory. I saw his penis this morning when he was waddling about like Donald Duck. He must have tweeted this picture of his penis on my timeline. But why? I immediately start worrying about silly things like my reputation, my standing with females, my friends, anyone who might see this and think I did it.

An online reputation can last for ever. Ask the Star Wars lightsabre kid.

I delete the tweet from my timeline but it’s too late. The damage has been done. He’s inflicted maximum carnage. I can see it’s been shared about 50 times. I excuse myself to the loo and sit on a rancid former toilet seat, trying to log into the Twitpic website. I find the incriminating photo and delete it. I change the password to my Twitter account and tweet that I’ve been hacked.

@kitab: ‘apologies for any damage done to retinas with previous tweet but I’ve been hacked by a tiny-cocked exhibitionist. at least he’s indian.’

But it’s too little too late.

The books editor of a major broadsheet has retweeted the photo. She followed me after I tweeted something funny to her so I’ve been holding on to her patronage for dear life. But she has retweeted the photo with an added ‘The things authors do for attention eh?’ So have a lot of people I know IRL. People are calling me all manner of names, like sex pest, rapey Kitab, pervert, idiot, cunt, douchebag – any rude word said about anyone is being levelled at me by friends, strangers and users of the internet. A couple of publicist girls are tweeting anecdotes about times I was drunk and sleazy towards them. Backlash to my book, seemingly well received at the time, is turning vitriolic. Someone calls me the ‘most unimportant writer of his generation’. Another says that my cock is more impressive than my writing, and my cock is tiny. Somewhere in the world, Kitab 2’s penis is tingling with all this attention.

I check the photo against my own penis just to make sure it wasn’t taken candidly or secretly. Definitely not mine. It’s too wild and unkempt to be mine. I’m caught looking at the phone screen and my own penis by a man wanting to use the cubicle. I’ve forgotten to lock the door. I nod at him as I leave hastily.

He arches his eyebrow at me.

‘Cancer app. Checking for testicle cancer.’

He nods and pulls out his phone.

‘Cool, what’s the name of the app?’ he says.

‘Nuts to Cancer,’ I say quickly, and leave before he can ask for clarification.

Back at the bar, Mitch has disappeared out the back for a cigarette. He’s left his paperback on top of his pint. I down half of my beer, dry-heave a burp out of the depths of my stomach and realise I need to leave. I’ve got a film of cold sweat on my top lip. Mitch is still out at the back of the pub, smoking, but won’t mind being left to his own devices. Often, I think he enjoys it. This is his local. He’s used to bringing paperbacks here on dates.

I hurry home to press refresh on Twitter, waiting for the fuss to die down and for people to tweet about reality television again. Of this much, you can be sure. Twitter is the water cooler of the evening. Imagine all those conversations with loved ones lost to quipping on the internet with comedians for lolz. I don’t respond to anything, least of all to people I know. I don’t have anything to say. The phone, the connection – the thing between Rach and me. Eyes on 2 screens, phone in hand, ready to be the first to tweet the most obvious joke about what’s on screen at any given time. The minor fuss eventually peters out. I don’t have that many followers. A few thousand. And now … most of them and their friends have seen my penis. I notice an auto-tweet from Amazon on my keyword search for my own fucking name saying that Kindle sales of my novel have hit the top 10 in fiction bestsellers. Maybe I should have done this myself months ago.