The link came in a text from her friend Josie. You gotta try this! she wrote. The odd thing was Josie never used “gotta” and she wasn’t in the habit of sending memes or websites. Evelyn examined the link. It was an app called The Enormous Radio App, which piqued Evelyn’s curiosity.
A few taps in the app store, and she was met with a prompt.
Choose a Network
She was then presented with a list of Wi-Fi networks, named in all the conventional manners: a pet’s name; a clever pun; a manufacturer’s stock descriptor; randomness. Evelyn chose
Z.Cassidy.Fam 5Ghz
Cassidy was a name on a mailbox in Evelyn’s building. Hers and Jed’s. Jed, her boyfriend of three years. A mild-mannered progressive whose outdoors background made him a little out of place at college, with his Carhart jackets and camo hats, though he fit right in, in the anonymous suburb, where they lived.
Three animated dots told Evelyn that the app was busy. She plunged her hand into a bag of trail mix heavy. Har jew still masticating, she pulled her lips tight to draw on her charged pen.
And so it begins. Where is your heart at, dear writer? Characters emerge—they’re people! Christ, we have to act responsibly. The anxiety of self-consciousness seeps in like a heavy metal in between the ears. Is this an insulting depiction? But I’m no different than Jane Goodall in the Congo. This is natural realism. We need a new type of clause in the language, a modifying clause that accounts for implied political positioning. Details pertaining to character are like stray bullets. The writer feels threatened but also a danger to himself. Strunk & White will have to add a whole new chapter in which they blithely and eloquently define the etiquette and scold writers into the latest incarnation of editorial restraint.
Wouldn’t we all rather be shooting a funny sketch about Bob Strunk III, grandson of the original grammarian, something showing how much he loves strident rules? Maybe the old gents—him and Theodore White III—want to go fishing, but they cannot agree on the term for the type of boat they’re getting in. One of them ends up in the drink, yelling “Throw me a buoy!” To which the other taunts, “You mean this flotation device?” Gold. Nothing like humor to take your mind off of fraught times. Then I monetize the video and live off the proceeds. Growing digital empires is a great distraction from the duty to create, which some damaged artists feel. They feel it even in an age so inimical to art, when it shouldn’t matter, when people are so disinterested in things beyond the length of their arm, that what could it possibly matter?
Ah, but that’s just easy pessimism. We just passed 700,000 deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S. These deaths and this anxiety are both a kind of background noise.
How to get back on track?
The heart.
JUST THEN Evelyn’s beau walked in. Jed. Stocking cap, plaid wool jacket, shoulder heavy with his backpack.
“Whatcha doin?”
“Got this app.”
“Did you eat?” There was very little else to talk about in a household every day, day after day. When you ate, when he ate, what you’re eating now, what you’ll eat later. For some it was Seinfeldian, but for Evelyn the jolly days of the nineties were over, and there was only the bleakness and repetition of lockdown life. An onerous tedium ruled her routines; she had run out of places in the house to take her dinner plate for a different view or some privacy. Even Netflix had gotten old.
“Hold on, I’m doing this,” Evelyn said.
Jed touched her leg and left the couch. Then with comic brightness, he intoned, “How was your day, honey?” He was not being snide—he was just doing one of his playful characters. That was Jed’s way. When Evelyn heard the sounds of Jed fixing himself food, she let him carry on. Sometimes just not responding was the best way to address the question of who will eat what, when, how, and even why.
Brute Force Attack Complete
said the app. Then the message went away and a graphic came up of an old-fashioned radio, one with brown paneling and sound rays flowing in smooth animated waves off the shore of its mesh-covered speaker. It looked like a powerful and ugly instrument, and she noticed some darkly humorous slogan written on its housing5F[1]: “Mistaken Penchant for Discord.”
A crackling noise like the noise of a burning powder fuse came through the speaker into Evelyn’s AirPods. Then through the static, she heard the sound of Mrs. Cassidy’s voice, from condo 402, above Evelyn and Jed’s place. Mrs. Cassidy was often heard around the pool ranting in a mad panic that the building would fall down “like that concrete hellhole in Florida.”
Put them in handle up, like this, or else the tops don’t come out clean.
Yeah, yeah.
The responding voice was that of a young male. About 14 years old, Evelyn guessed. Must have been Mrs. Cassidy’s teenage son. But didn’t he live with his father?
And then the app displayed an entire phone’s screen.
Ding! A notification sounded. But it wasn’t Evelyn’s delicate bip-bip like lips smacking. It was the ring of cashier’s bells. Evelyn’s body grew even more huddled, and her eyes bulged with disbelief. She felt the illicit kind of gratifying excitement of anticipation, as the phone within her phone showed a text message from someone named Davon:
What time we meeting Gary
“Holy Jesus,” Evelyn said under her breath. She looked back in the app store, scrolled through the description. Was this allowed? She looked to the see who made the app, but it was some company she’d never heard of. Just another sign of a world run amok.
“What’s a brute force attack?” Evelyn called to Jed.
Jed came down from the stepstool clutching the juicing machine. “Not something you should do. Why?”
She looked at him out of the corner of her eyes, never taking her eyes off Mrs. Cassidy’s phone, as the first letters of her reply began to appear.
Don’t...
“No reason.”
But then the words stopped, and Mrs. Cassidy spoke instead.
“Who’s that?” Jed asked.
“Shhh!”
Evelyn heard keys jangling and the clap of heels on hardwood.
She keyed up the volume.
The teenage boy spoke.
Where are you going?
“Who is that?”
I’m going to church with your aunt. You know that. I always go to church on Friday nights.
“Oh, right!” Evelyn yelled. “With Davon? And the dude you’re meeting is Jesus.”
“Is that a new podcast?” Jed said, putting the juicer down and coming into the room.
Finally breaking her intense, huddle-like crouch on the sofa, Evelyn closed the app and tossed her phone atop the coffee table. “It’s nothing,” she said. “Just a nutty YouTube Donna sent me.”
Jed released a disappointed groan. He liked it when Evelyn, who he hoped would be his wife one day, shared her online interests. Granted, it might have been a case of mutual enabling of internet and social media addictions—he, after all, constantly shared Reddit stuff—but never mind; in 2021 we turn the other cheek to these coping mechanisms. They are the norm now. By speaking to each other of the social posts we’ve seen and made, we include people in our lives of viewing and being viewed.
“It sounded like an argument,” Jed said.
“Oh, no.” Evelyn laughed. “Are you making smoothies for two?” She pumped her eyebrows mock-seductively, and followed Jed to the kitchen. She would look in the crisper drawer to see what is not wilted yet. And she would make sure Jed put enough almonds in the smoothies, and not too much maple syrup in hers.
[1] The radio was only a graphic representation, of course, and its housing didn’t exist in the real world, materially, other than as bits of lit pixels in certain shades under Gorilla glass. Yet for Evelyn, it took on the qualities of a tangible radio. This confusion is part of life’s descent into the surreal in 2021; one thinks of things seen online and relates to them, remembers them, as being, as extant, as having taken place, been heard or witnessed directly. Text messages are recalled as “conversations”; and one thinks of clicking objects such as a ladle, that predate clicking and in fact have no digital or electronic interface. Recently I drove a 2004 pickup truck that doesn’t run well enough to be driven regularly; my left thumb pressed a volume up button on the steering wheel that wasn’t there, to increase volume on a device that wasn’t even connected to the nonexistent Bluetooth!