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Cygnus atratus

Sometimes, when Zach had too much coffee, when he had sneaked a smoke on the back porch that projects out over the weedy ground and right up to the back wall, beyond which is the alley and driveway of an apartment complex in drab rose and orange, sometimes he would lie awake until there was a subtle shift in his sensibilities that was almost like a buzz encompassing him, and he would go on thinking about the events of the day even as he drifted off to sleep and then awoke again, minutes later, and was still thinking about them, like an unbroken chain of reasoning that suffered a momentary dip. But there was always a specter hanging in the facts and the faces and the ideas, like an irrational interloper. Only a fever ever reproduced anything like those moments—like that specter—only a fever could twist ideas over themselves into the impossible and weird motifs that were a merger of sleep and waking fantasies. Zach would rouse in those moments or sometimes bolt upright while trying to reclaim the ideas and force them into a coherent whole, but then, when the pieces had regained their permanence and the puzzle was reunited and showed, once again, the rational and calm artwork on the box of everyday reality, Zach would find himself longing for that alternative state, for the confusion that he struggled to subdue in the hypnagogic fog. It was not just curiosity, he realized, but a sense that there was a constructive event surfacing out of his unconscious self—an event that was using his memories for some special purpose.

There was an ameliorative effect to the anxieties of the day that crept in at those moments, like a sieve had strained all the complexity out of the bursts of nervous arousal, and he would lean back again into the hollow of his down pillow that smelled like his hair, tinged by his shampoo, and turn his face into the dome, sliding his cheek against the silky weave of the pillowcase, finally thinking that sleep would arrive soon. Mostly, then, he would move into the shadows and fog of sleep but, now and again, he would hover there for hours, replaying and reinventing the edges of discussions, the mandates of school anxieties, and the incomprehensible transgressions of strangers into his life. Morning would come too soon on those nights, and he would be the first to see the grays emerging behind the sulfur streetlights, his anxiety rising again at how he would survive the day half asleep, trudging through school halls or, if it was a Friday or Saturday night, relaxed enough to sleep straight through until the sunlight reflected off the apartment windows and played across the walls of his room, his cavern, and he awoke into the warm buzz of the afternoon.

The shooting—that day—kept him awake almost every night, replaying the slow churn of events, encircling everyone’s reactions with descriptions and summaries that formed a narrative backbone for what had happened. We were scared, he thought, we were all scared, but we were also determined to survive. We would have moved to stop the shooter if he had come through that door. Fantasies, constructed of the scripting television mindset, involved him vaulting over chairs and tables to tackle the shooter, cushioned by the thick down coat as they slid into the hall. He was a hero and had saved the school, and had to stand before the school and the national cameras to accept the accolades earned by selfless heroism. There was the alternative where he kicked a desk into a perfect crotch-smashing impulse, forcing the dropping of the gun, and more awards. There was the armed Zach who always kept a secret handgun for just such a moment, ending the shooter’s life with a single, perfect shot, and being forgiven for his rakish disregard for the law in carrying firearms on campus. There were all these possible outcomes but only the trajectory of slow fear building and releasing was the real history, and Zach always began and ended with that same recollection, pregnant with the reality of that moment, the smell of sweat and urine, the fight or flight of three score teens just barely held against an impending doom.

Zach would get up again. He would pace and log on. There was always something going on somewhere, and he would distract himself and distance himself in the dance of egos and the petty worlds of ideas that they created until he finally shut down again, tired and bored, and lay down and ran through the same sequence once again. He was still working on The Spinner, these late nights, pulling at the strands and connections that Zach thought might, if plucked precisely, reveal chords, notes, and leitmotifs that would unmask the man’s motives and reasons. The Spinner’s cadre of supporters began justifying the shooting shortly after they realized that it was him. The first foray began with a young man, Zach triangulated, who lived somewhere in Idaho and was a conspiratorial monolog on climate change science, refracting almost any comment or query in the group through an hysterically anti-science lens. His forum identity, PoorGore, saw coalitions and cabals at work in everything. He was convinced that the flat screen television interests had been stealthily promoting global warming to convince people to buy their products over the traditional and cheaper technology of the cathode ray tube. Within the group, no one challenged PoorGore because challenging those within the group was simply not done. They feasted on repetition and fasted on challenges—unless they were from the outside. Truly crazy propositions were left uncommented on or treated with a circumspect caution that respected the passions of the claimant while ignoring the content of the claim.

PoorGore reached out to the memory of The Spinner first, relating how he would miss the man’s knowledge and clarity about the great crisis that America and the whole world was facing. The Spinner wanted freedom again, PoorGore asserted, and maybe there were subversive anti-freedom zealots at that school, there along the Left Coast, who had tried to suppress him. Maybe he was chased onto the school grounds by government agents intent on silencing him. The rest was collateral damage. PoorGore began latching onto little inconsistencies across the media reports, pulled from archives compliments the never forgetting internet brain, about whether the gunman was described as tall or medium build, about whether he was Anglo or Asian. The consistencies were significant, PoorGore was certain, and pointed towards a truth that was being obscured by the authorities because of their perverse agendas. There were phantoms in the dark for all of The Spinner’s online compatriots. There were globalists and agendaists. The enemies were even more ideologically monotonic than PoorGore and Spinner; their fates circumscribed by intellectual histories into continuities that had the stink of evil once reserved for Mao, Hitler, and Stalin.

PoorGore became the defender of The Spinner’s memory, creating a widely friended shrine on AetherFaces that described some of his greatest achievements, including his discovery of the roots of the great environmental crisis hoax, his treatise on the relationship between ethnicity and the worldwide recession (unlocatable, according to most commenters, but undoubtedly brilliant), and his love of Glocks and spearmint gum. The friends had piled on in the tens of thousands. Some appeared to be urban hipsters who found the entire affair from the shooting to the shrine to be a celebration of the perversity of online life. These friends were friends of the slain students, too. Most were unknowns, devoid of long shadows in the AntiTerran and Aether worlds, drawn towards the flame by a recognition of some similar urge within themselves. They left short, incoherent comments about fighting for freedom. There was hate mail by the screen-full, too: powerful, angry declarations of loathing and, quite often, the desire to harm everyone who supported The Spinner. The irony was only occasionally commented on with emoticons and snarky little motes.

PoorGore held up against the onslaught with remarkable persistence, ignoring the strongest haters (as he called them) and focusing his attentions on the voices he already knew and who he knew were friendly towards the cause. It was a cause for PoorGore, by then, that involved defending the crumbling state of ideas that had been poisoned by an infiltration of chaos, but it was becoming a cause with him as the de facto leader. It swelled his importance in the shadow of The Spinner and Zach was certain that PoorGore was riding the initial swells of a wave that would grow in intensity. The Spinner had redirected the perceptual impulses of millions towards his incoherent platform of social and political affronts. He had done it through horror, but it had been enough to train a spotlight towards his clan. Most were repulsed, but, as with statistical regularity the laws of increasingly larger numbers materialized a lumpy centroid and long, fat tails. Sympathetic minds lived on that tail and saw a tortured soul in The Spinner or, at the very least, a soul who was so convinced of his oppression by the grand wizard of the machinery of life that he had been driven mad by it and snapped, and that was perfectly acknowledgeable (if not acceptable, actually) as the way that great yet subtle oppression works in the modern world. He had snapped, like a twig on a winter tree, and we all had to suffer a little bit as a result.

The counterpoint of the detractors, the critics, and the suffering from the school and around the world combined a summa of outrage with efforts to personalize the tragedy. Pictures were posted of the shooting victims in happier times, odes were written to them, and people poured out their hearts about what great people they had been, how they had loved their families and been loved so very much, and about how they were always willing to lend a hand or help someone in need. Zach was suspicious of the clarity of this kind of thought, but found it an ameliorative antidote to the mucky quagmire of PoorGore and his eschatological justifications. They were just normal kids, he reasoned, and were as flawed as anyone at that age. They weren’t perfect but had clear consciences and records because they were so young that any missteps they had taken, any rules they had bent, and any trials they had weathered were only products of unfocussed intent. Everyone was good and full of potential and the sorting process of meritocratic yearnings was still a few years away. Zach wondered how anyone could render coherent judgments about anything for kids his age. We react, he thought, and we mix in the basic calculus of moral action from our childhood with a bit of randomized desire. We are neither good nor bad. We are not even really intentional. Anything can be overlooked, forgiven, written off. The language they were looking for was the language of innocence—not the language of perfection—but the commentaries, the pictures, and the angry threats were a way to dampen the suffering by sharing in the experience. Zach found no fault in that and posted a few brief confirmatory statements. She will be missed, he wrote, slightly guilty over having never met her, but noting dryly to himself that he was certain she will be missed. He hesitated, too, as he slid the pointer over to post the comment, hesitated because it was a technical exaggeration and even a little white lie, but it hurt no one and might help someone—even him—and so did what he always did when there was doubt and anxiety in the online multiverses: he clicked the button to post and closed his browser, severing any contact with that universe, then put on his darker mask and descended into the hacker-verse where identity was purified into pride and hubris, where the male ego was puffed up and expended between masturbation sessions, between coffees, and in the haunted caves of connected computers all across the planet.

There was nothing anomalous about anyone’s reactions to the events of that day. Only the day itself was an anomaly chiseled out of the fine talc of their everyday comings and goings. Zach watched a reality show segment vidcast through AetherFaces and knew that almost any of his classmates would sacrifice friendships and opportunities just to be among those dreaded and adored figures parading in voyeuristic unions with expectations of conflict and drama. If a shooting had enough mystery it could be a reality show, too. He imagined the interviews with the personable and good-looking at his school, spinning out ages-old explanations for the personalities and motivations of those around him, waiting for Godot to either swing the barrel at them or exonerate them in a dramatic act worthy of another season of performances, of cliffhanger relationships, and of closing doors behind which everyone is explicitly moving into a private sphere that is hinted at by the clutching hands as the portal shuts and the commercial break expands out of the brief blackness, the anomaly of silence punctuating the amplified interactions and choreographed collisions.

He shut it down then and fell onto that pillow, sweet from his shampoo, and was still and silent as a buzzing, like a warm collage of bees, descended on him and he spasmed back to wakefulness for just a minute, and thought about another can of Diet Coke or a brief cigarette interlude or that thin joint left over in the back of his pack of Camels stashed behind his monitor in the box of miniature paints and brushes, but then the shadows overwhelmed the buzz and there was no more Zach for hours. He was annihilated by the web and its weight on him, and the fear.