Once, Lyle’s sense was the internet was reorganizing the world. Third world cell phones connected to everywhere else, so where you stood needn’t be where you were, virtually. Technology was only half of it. The ethos reached deeper. Pedestals were falling, boundaries drawn by nationalists. And most of all there was the thought that democracy means elites get the media they deserve.
But his undoing was swift. Maybe it was to be expected. Lyle’s boss, Greenie, had always said there wasn’t time for long stories on the internet; there was time to be first. Break before the others. Lyle had broken faster and faster, found the complacent hypocrites, gunned for traffic. Once a week, Greenie would gather them for editorial meetings and show them their rise and fall, so Lyle published the address of an internet troll sent by a tipster. He published hacked emails proving racial targeting by predatory lenders. He published screenshots of the New Left editor James Hausman’s engagement of a male prostitute via an online classifieds page.
But it was this story that had made everyone who was and was not paid to think on the internet opine that his work was malicious and unnecessary. James Hausman was a good editor of important, progressive pieces. James Hausman had not been ready to come out, and people were calling Lyle Michaels worse than a reckless blogger; they called him a homophobe. Then there was the speculation that the hooker who’d provided Hausman with oral sex had been paid by conservatives. Maybe Lyle had. When nine months of unemployment checks had passed, he still hadn’t found a job.
At times, his daughter, Marina, placated his anxiety, just looking at her. A scalp freckle that one day would go secret with hair. Sequin of nail. He had never felt the athlete impulse until he had first carried her outside, one defensive arm blocking the crush of city torsos. She fell asleep clutching a fist of T-shirt on his weekends, and for a while, he could forget to catch up to the person he had decided he ought to be as he held his daughter.
But lately, paper stating debts had begun arriving in the afternoons. Lyle could hear the postman’s keys from the apartment as he stared at an endless log of horrible jobs. Chink of cheap metal, the clamp of shut doors. He dreaded envelopes. He got a second credit card, and then he was denied a third. He had to ask his father for money when Ingrid pressed for late child support. It was one of several humiliations.
Still, when he thought about it, which was not infrequent, he figured the worst of his termination was missing the financial collapse. Late 2008, he’d watched the web of stories grow on the internet. Lehman Brothers. Bear Stearns. The drama of subprime-backed CDOs. This was everyday terror: bogus credit ratings, profit on people who still believed in the American Dream.
In graduate school he had been meant to come to conclusions about advances in the printing press or the television or the phone, something about the utopia of a connected world getting caught in de facto monopolies, that there were only two ways to be—powerful or fucked—and that every unchecked politician perpetuated the naturalization of capitalism. He’d left graduate school for journalism to peel back all the undifferentiated apathy, exposing corruption. He had wanted to knock the egos out of powerful men. Yet somehow what had happened was people who professionally defaced former child stars in Photoshop were telling the generational story he had been circling around most of his adult life. It only made him resent Greenie more. He obsessed over Noze bylines. And when his replacement, Saul Vaughn, published an investigative piece in a major legacy magazine about a Monsanto ghostwriter who’d placed articles in peer-reviewed science journals concluding their weed killer was not carcinogenic, absolute lies based on fabricated research, he called Bri Freeman, something jumpy inside.
“So he’s got weed killer,” she said. “There’s a pesticide scandal for everyone out there.”
“Actually,” Lyle said, “there is not.”
The line was dead a beat, then: “And that’s disappointing to you.”
It was, he supposed, the sort of condescension afforded someone preternaturally successful, a view from on high, where, once you’d deserved it, that position, you could see everything else as small, small-minded, petty considerations.
“How’s my old pal Frank?” Bri Freeman asked finally.
“He says the Micellis always worked.”
“And you say?”
“I say I’m an entitled white male, and I intend to preserve my energy for intellectual labor.”
“Some people would say the thing about irony,” Bri began.
“Some people would be all right with sustenance.”
“But you.”
“I’m not all right with being less than who I used to be on the way to becoming.” He moved his phone to the other ear. Shift ears, shift what is heard. Shift something of the conversation.
“There’s a woman in my department,” Bri began.
“I wish I joined a department.”
“No, you don’t.”
“No, I don’t.” He scratched his beard.
“But you know you always could come back, if you wanted,” Bri said after a while. “Stand in front of a classroom, get chalk on your pants.”
And because he did not know how to go back, he said, “I spill coffee on my shirt. Isn’t that enough?” It was more bitter in the utterance than he’d anticipated.
“I’m asking,” she said.
It seemed on Cathexis that everyone he knew was always doing something that occasioned wine and cheese, and he had begun to think the only way back, the only way out was a book, a book bigger than the internet, more important and lasting, a book that would make the think pieces look as small as they were. Not weed killer, but something else. Something other than not even reading the book on weed killer, not even the glowing review, but the title on a list of books notionally connected by quality that the list-maker probably hadn’t read either. “It doesn’t work like that. There’s an order of operations.”
“Since when is happiness math, Lyle?” Bri began.
“Since Jeremy Bentham,” he said. Then he turned to the window. “What I took from studying history is you make certain decisions at certain moments, and they compound through time, and then that’s your life. It’s how you invent the weapon that ends the war. It’s how you become the leader of the free world or are too late for victory.”
“But sometimes it isn’t too late.”
“Sometimes it’s too early,” he sighed. “You die from diphtheria still.”