One
The Internet is down. That great hole in the sky? You know, the secret one? The one that all the hope and joy and gifs of cats pours from? The source of all that is wonderful and beautiful and idiotic and uncomfortably funny? Well, it’s gone. It’s closed up shop and gone somewhere else to peddle its trinkets of amusement and unsubstantiated opinion. It’s gone and it’s left me here to grapple with the hardships of reality, in the uncertainty that comes with an undisclosed outage duration.
Nothing works without the Internet anymore. My iPad wants to check that I’m opening the latest version of the English essay I was working on – but it can’t. The PlayStation wants to make sure that the disc I’ve loaded is legitimate – it wants to touch base with its masters back and Sony headquarters just to reassure itself that I’m not a thief. At least not today.
And that’s when it dawns on me.
That’s when I become acutely aware of the dystopian reality of my disorderly bungalow out the back of my parents middle-class home.
There’s nothing for me to do.
Nothing that matters, at least. Everything that is of any importance at all is on the Internet. It’s all there: Facebook, the weather bureau, awkward seal! What can be achieved in life without the terrified eyes of awkward seal?
I can’t possibly sit here and… and… exist.
Disconnected.
I mean, what is that anymore? There is nothing without connection. I listen to Apple Music when I hang with my friends! I check Snapchat and Facebook and keep up to date with all the important events as they happen! I don’t live in a world that is accustomed to waiting. When I want it, I get it. If I want to know who that girl was in that re-run from The O.C. that aired earlier tonight, I just fire up IMDb and check her out.
The room feels intensely close around me. I am deeply uncomfortable about the tangibility of this predicament. I close my eyes, like really squeezing them shut. You know, like that might jolt the whole spider-web of digital information floating about in the air to get back on course and start filling my screen with the sweet bliss of artificial light and temperamental interactions.
I could drive to Maccas.
They have free wifi.
My parents wouldn’t hear me leave. It’s after midnight – they’d be fast asleep, dreaming of mortgage repayments and golf and flower settings, or whatever really interests them – I’m not going to even pretend to know. The gentle curve of those Golden Arches might be my saviour. They might provide the digital sustenance capable of dissolving their patchy history of lies and underwhelming gastronomic fulfillment.
My eyes snap open and dart about the room chaotically. The movement is chaotic because I’m getting stressed out by this experience, and because my room is a mess. I’m nineteen – my life is 74% Internet, 12% junk food, 8% pretending I have a plan for the future, and 6% selling that plan as convincingly as I can manage to anyone who asks. That leaves absolutely 0% for tidying up, folding clothes, making the bed, putting the bookshelf to use the way it was meant to be, and vacuuming.
The place is in bad shape.
But it’s been worse. I managed to make twenty minutes or so about a fortnight ago to push the clothes on the floor around with my feet. It was an efficient twenty minutes, if I must say so myself. I went from having a carpet resembling the stones that Aladdin jumps between when he’s fleeing all that lava and stuff in the Cave of Wonders, to having a secure pathway that more resembled the bit where he was moving between the piles of gold.
It’s a good analogy.
My clothes are like piles of gold – specifically like the ones in Aladdin.
As in, don’t touch them.
My keys are in their holster – it’s a specific place on the floor about fifteen centimetres squared just by the door. I let my eyes wander again because my wallet is not where it should be. It’s not on the floor – at least not, you know, visibly. I’m not kitted out for anything more than a visual search. The situation is too dire to consider anything more intense. And it’s not like I would have buried it.
I’m not a sadist.
The bed seems to shrink away from me, almost guiltily, I imagine. It has the wallet. It’s there amidst to doona and the sheets. It has to be. The bed has that secretive look about it, like it is shrouded in a fog of mystery. As though, maybe it is concealing the special item I require to escape this dungeon of mundanity – to forge my way to freedom, to the Golden Arches – the holy refuge of connectivity and the marketplace of candy for the soul. Or at least, candy the soul wants even if it will kill the body.
I swivel in the seat for a better look, but my phone rings, the light sending the room into an ethereal glow reminiscent of webpages and YouTube clips, and the times – so long ago (minutes – perhaps even tens of minutes!) – when I felt whole.
The screen is flashing with an image of a pointed ear. You know, like the ones elves have in ‘The Lord of the Rings’. There’s a reason for this. It’s a good one too. If you’ll just let me explain, I’m sure you’ll understand the brilliant intricacy of my not so original or secretive joke.
Arwen is calling. Arwen, the elf from Lord of the Rings. Liv Tyler’s character. The cute but kind of creepy one who has a forbidden thing with Viggo, I mean, Aragorn.
Now that I think of it, all of the elves are kind of creepy. Is that the price they pay for having super-long lives and what appears to be an unnecessary level of inherited wealth?
“Son/daughter, you are an elf and all of this sparkly brilliance is yours. You will have secret knowledge of a whole tonne of random stuff, access to whatever comforts your life requires, a home by a glittering bay, pointy ears, unnatural beauty (if you’re into that sort of thing), and a super-duper-long life. Isn’t that magnificent? I have done so much for you my sweet child. Also, you get to treat everyone else like they’re plebs. Oh, and… *mumble mumble* you’ll be a creep like the rest of us… Enjoy!”
That’s totally how it would go down.
The point is, I have a friend called Arwen. My best friend in fact. We’ve been buddies for something like the length of an elven life. In other words, ages. She’s not creepy though – well, not really. She does have kind of pointy ears though.
“Hey,” I answer, sliding out of my chair and navigating the piles of gold to my disheveled bed.
“This is fucked, Cade.”
Don’t mention my name, okay? It’s something we’re not going to talk about.
“The Internet down for you?”
I nod, thrusting my free hand into the sheets and rummaging.
“Cade?”
“Yeah, shit. Sorry. Yep. It’s like the first sign of the apocalypse over here too.”
“What’re you gonna do? I can’t live like this. I’ve got stuff to do. There was a skirt on eBay that finishes in like twenty-two minutes. What if I get outbid, Cade? It’s the only one. It’s never gonna to be on sale again – not for, like, half-price! I have to have it.”
“Yeah, sure… Was your highest bid reasonable? eBay will take care of you. It bids for you and all that.”
“But what if they bid higher? What if someone wants it more than the arbitrary number I gave it? What then, hey?”
“Well,” I find my wallet and hold it up towards the ceiling in a show of triumph. “Well, then it wasn’t your highest bid, was it?”
“Fuck, Cade! You’re not being very helpful! Of course it’s not my highest bid today! It was the highest I could convince myself to put in at the time. But you know what it’s like. Now I realise how important this skirt is. This is the skirt that will tie my entire wardrobe together.”
I sincerely doubt this, but she continues anyway.
“This will complete me. If John sees me in this skirt he’s definitely gonna ask me to formal. It’d be, like… Like a done deal. This. Is. The. One.”
I grimace. John Su is a dick. I hate the idea of Arwen and John Su doing anything together let alone the prospect of his piano fingers roaming their way over her body at formal. My triumphant wallet bearing arm flops back onto the bed and I groan.
“I don’t know what you see in him, Arwen. He’s–” but she cuts me off because she can’t handle the idea that someone might bad mouth, John Su, Chinese God-child, creator of the Rubik’s Cube, and master of the known universe, or whatever.
“Amazing? That’s exactly what I see in him, Cade. I’m glad you’ve finally opened your eyes. What’s that? Oh well, he’s amazing because he can play any instrument as though it’s the only thing he’s ever played, and he’s a state champion in dance which means he’s ripped, and well… Have you seen him smile? Those little dimples he gets? He could just, like, impregnate me with–”
“Wow! Okay! Thanks for calling, Arwen! Too much fucking information, thanks! I’ll see you tomorrow. I gotta go.”
“Go? What? What’re you gonna do? There’s no Internet, remember? You’re full of shit, you’ve got nothing to do. You need to help me get Internet so I can protect my investment, Cade. So that I can protect my future.”
I sigh loudly. Purposefully.
“What do you expect me to do?”
“Well… You’ve got a plan, right? You’ve always got a plan. A contingency for this kind of shit? You know, like a secret generator? Or a pedal operated Internet service provider that you’d operate selflessly for your best friend, so that she can fulfill her dreams?”
“I don’t have any secrets. But I was gonna head to Maccas for their free wifi if you want to come.”
I say it begrudgingly, but really I’m kind of happy that she might come along. I’d feel like a bit of a loner sitting beneath the Golden Arches eating the cheapest thing they have for sale and pilfering their Internet. If my life was a TV show the camera would be held in close on my face, illuminated by my phone, while I eat a gob of soft serve – then it would slowly pull back revealing me to be the only one in the restaurant, and all the lights would fade out except for the arches which would spotlight me in their yellow glow, darkness everywhere as I sit alone.
There’s a knock on my door. I stare at it skeptically.
“Hold on, there’s someone at my door.”
I navigate the gold piles and retrieve my keys from the floor, stuffing them, along with my wallet, into my pockets.
There’s no sound from the far side of the door. I listen for a few heartbeats, not sure what I’m expecting – heavy breathing? A public service announcement on repeat explaining who it is? I twist the door handle, keeping my little finger over the button so that it doesn’t make that annoying pop when it is unlocked, and peer through the tiny gap I allow.
“Hurry up, Cade. Fuck. It’s cold out here.”
It’s Arwen. I eye her incredulously and look stupidly at my phone which is still connected to hers. I hold it up to my ear and speak, but a high-pitched whistle screams through the device’s speaker.
Her eyes glaze over and she hangs up her phone as though she’s explaining something extremely simple to the kid who is deliberately refusing to listen to her.
“I knew you’d have a plan so I started walking before I called.” She smiles, glossing over my dull response to her arrival. I catch a glimpse of her pronounced canines. “Come on. Let’s go. The clock is ticking here!”
She grabs my hand and pulls me out the door. Her hands are big. Spindly even. They’re massive beside mine. I find it a little emasculating, though I’d never tell her that. She’d probably think I was calling her a man, when I’d actually be suggesting that it was me who was completely lacking in the expected characteristics rather than anything else. I pull the door closed behind me and follow her up the path beside the house, hissing that she needs to stay quiet.
“It’ll be fine,” she whispers back. “Your parents love me.”
“They might love you,” I inform her, “but that doesn’t do anything for me if we wake them up.”
“Well, hurry up then. My skirt and John Su’s eternal love and affection are at stake here.”
It’s dark out on the street where my old Camry station wagon is parked up against the gutter. The old car has served me well and I can proudly say that I’ve even had it serviced in the year and half that I’ve owned it. With 243,000k’s on the clock I figure that nothing drastic can go wrong without a whole lot of signposting by way of noises, pieces falling off, or flames. All the kinks must have worked there way out by now.
Arwen reaches the passenger side and begins pulling the door handle repeatedly. She knows that the door won’t unlock until I get in the car and reach across to do it, but this is one of her favourite ways to annoy me. It’s her way of putting pressure on me to perform. I don’t think she does it for any truly malicious reason, but I do wonder about how calculated it is. Like, how aware is she that I hate to see her unhappy?
Once we’re in the car, I cross my fingers and insert the key before pursing my lips with a little prayer in hope that the car kicks over first go. We both know that if it doesn’t work first time it will cough and splutter and possibly backfire. And we both know that that would be the equivalent of setting off a firecracker in my parents bedroom. My dad would come sprinting out in his pyjamas, probably in a state of half-cardiac arrest, just because he thinks someone is trying to steal the car.
He’d be scrambling to defend my honour.
That’s the kind of guy he is.
Of course, then I’d have to explain why I was still up and what Arwen and I were doing and she’d miss out on her skirt and I’d continue to be stuck in this Internet-less reality. He’d probably send her home and send me to my room and I’d have no choice other than to go to bed.
I look across at her before I turn the key. I can see she’s holding her breath. She’s probably playing through the exact same scenario in her head.
“Why don’t you just bid on your phone?” I ask.
“No data. Come on, let’s go!”
“Do you want to use my phone?” I ask this knowing that I have about two megs of data left.
“No, I want to use free wifi fueled by the tears of fat people. Come on.”
I close my eyes and turn the key.
The Camry bursts into life and I shove it into drive before it even has the chance to consider backfiring and waking half the street.
“How is it fueled by their tears?”
“What?”
“Well,” I pause, head-checking to the left before turning, “it’s just a weird image. Like, why are the fat people crying if they’re already at Maccas? And surely that’s not enough to power the wifi…”
Arwen punches me in the thigh with her massive pointy knuckles. I wince and feel the muscle in my left leg pass out with the shock of it all.
“They’re tears of joy, idiot. They’re, like, hoofing down the burgers and fries and these thick salty tears are just pouring from their eyes because nothing in this world or the next could be any better. I mean, what does heaven have to offer if not a McDonalds that perpetually feeds you your favourite dish?”
I don’t say anything for a few seconds and we round another corner, the luminous gold of the McDonalds ‘M’ swinging into view and bathing the world in its beautiful light.
“So much about what you just said is really fucked up, Arwen. I hope you realise that.”
But she’s not listening. She’s practically straining at the seatbelt – leaning forwards, willing the car to move faster, to give her more time to log into her eBay account and monitor the bidding on her skirt. I’m just glad to be doing something that isn’t hitting refresh on the router and hoping that it will miraculously connect me to the great wide world beyond suburban Melbourne.
I glance across at Arwen.
Who knows?
Maybe the Internet going down was a good thing?
