Joshua Cohen - Four New Messages

When someone went to the kitchen, opened the fridge, and retrieved another beer for you it was, Before you drinking beer was just like staring at the ceiling, when someone tapped out a thick fat line for you with their parents’ Platinum Plus Visa card on the glass slab tiered above the baize bottom of the house’s threequartersize poker table it was, Before you coke was just like staring at the ceiling, then that prefatory endearment was dropped with the tense and it was only, This couch is just like staring at the ceiling, This floor is just like staring at the ceiling, This ceiling’s just like staring at the ceiling.

You had to be there but you’re lucky you weren’t.

Somebody left to buy the ingredients to bake a pie, somebody left to buy a pie, somebody left.

Cakes v. pies were debated, cupcakes v. muffins were too, the salient differences between them, the identities of the world’s greatest lacrosse players were discussed, various names proposed both at the college level and pro. Pressing questions asked and answered: What’s more degrading, working as a stripper or working as a maid? What’s the best position to have re: Iran — preemptive strikes or sanctions inevitably targeting women and children? What’s the best sexual position for virginity loss — for a man, for a woman, for a child? Is there a future for campaign finance reform after the veritable abortion of Citizens United v. FEC? If you could repeal any amendment to the Constitution, which (no one allowed anymore to pick the first ten, whichever amendment repealed Prohibition, or the thirteenth, fourteenth, or fifteenth)? If you were a fart, what type (how wet, what smell)? Ten Most Mortifying Moments? Most egregious party foul? If you could describe your entire life in only one word to only one dead grandparent, which grandparent and what word?

Etc.

Mono’s apartment had been advertised as a one bedroom but having remitted the deposit he admitted to himself, why not, it was a studio. What the realtor maintained made it a one bedroom was a small little nothing nook by the door so minuscule that whenever Mono wanted to open the door he had to move the television onto the bed. His TV slept better than he did. The door’s peephole had been blackened for a robbery. The window opposite gave onto parkinglot, he never kept it open, gas. On the floor, lotto stubs, scratchers he’d scratch with teeth. Underlabeled whiskey under the label. Flies at the bottom of a liter of cola. In the bathroom clothing hung from the showerhead smelling alternately feculent and moldy. The sink was mustached with shavings. He’d been using takeout napkins as toiletpaper for a month. The sounds he’d hear by morning were those of mice the size of his pinky sprayed newborn from the walls or, once, the whining die of the smokedetector’s batteries. The apartment had no light because the bulbs had burnt out and he never remembered to replace them. Anyway Mono was rarely home at night and the television was enough light and the computer was sufficient too.

Mono was ISO work. He was perpetually interviewing and applying himself to applications because what’s life for a man in the middle?

Interrupting binges where if you didn’t have what they wanted you yourself weren’t wanted.

Only feared.

Meeting people furtively but trying to be kind. Yet having that kindness misinterpreted.

I don’t care what you think about the Yankees’ outfield, one kid said, I just want my fucking drugs.

Yankee wants his fucking drugs? Mono unsure of what to say.

The kid apologized.

Accidental, his initial involvement. Mono had begun delivering when he began owing Methyl money — short one night on an eightball he was supposed to have split before a food court coworker bailed (that one week Mono worked at Quaker Mall).

He knew he had to get out when this past New Year’s down the shore at a condo shuttered for the season a fierce former valedictorian who’d strolled with him along the snowy beach had said, Let’s continue this conversation some other time — a convo about renewable energy — like when I’m sober and you’re not my dealer.

Mono had had sex with her lesbian friend that night: she was stretchmark mangled, solicitous. She’d feigned abandon, collapsed on the bed, but just when Mono wanted to fall asleep she went to the bathroom to brush teeth, which was tender. The next morning she picked his jeans up from the floor and turned the pantlegs rightside out while Mono repositioned the pair of athletic socks in his jacket’s breastpocket — an advertisement for his packing a gun. That was the only time he’d had sex this year.

The résumé he’d been sending around he’d falsified: his experience including six months as executive assistant in a film production company he’d created, a year as a consultant to a pharmaceutical consulting firm for whose HR hotline he gave his own phone, figuring he could talk drug distribution with the best — while his other references tended toward the suspiciously familial: his cousin who’d developed a dating website and was too lazy busy getting laid to pick up the phone, another cousin who did the ordering for but did not own as Mono had stated Trenton’s North Triangle Liquors — though when it came to education he demurred: granting himself only a B.A. if cum laude, supplemented vainly by a Dean’s Award in English.

Despite this, he’d become inured to rejection: Never called back by that Suburban Poverty Task Force that needed someone with a liberal arts background to disorganize their archives, bend paperclips into helicopters and swans. Refused by that talent management agency requiring a front office rep. (he was overqualified, they qualified). A limousine driver, a limo dispatcher (ditto). Each being the juniormost position each business offered.

Monday punctually at noon the phone rang and Mono answered and a voice said, Mr. Monomian (the pronunciation was passable), I’m calling from Skilling Militainment Solutions.

Mr. Skilling, Mono said.

There is no Skilling. This is O. J. Muggs, recruiter, ret. capt. Marines.

Mono, sitting up in bed, said, Sir.

I’m afraid we can’t offer you the position.

You can’t? The position? But I haven’t even been interviewed.

You won’t be. This does not constitute an interview. Please say yes, indicating your understanding.

No I don’t understand.

Don’t fool yourself, son. Not even civilians are exempt from civility. Security isn’t just armed convoys, it’s also a sound reputation.

What’s unsound about my reputation?

What you do in private is your business, until it becomes public, and then it’s your employer’s business, especially if your employer’s employed by the government of the United States. War’s all about image — and effective chaplaincy and counterinsurgency.

Come again?

You need to clear your profile, son.

My profile, what about it?

Your presence, you need to clean your presence.

I’m not following, and Mono canvassed his apartment, wondering whether the man had a camera focused on him or was just intuitive.

The internet, Muggs said, are you aware of your internet?

Mono was not aware of his internet. He’d never made a habit of googling himself — it was too depressing a venture.

Previously his life had passed undetected by bots. His life too modest for hits, too meek for the concerns of blogpostings and tweets.

Mono had always taken such paucity personally — virtual presence being, to him, presence nonetheless.

Whenever he searched there were only two results, two matches found: the first listing his name along with others of his class from Princeton High, the second aggregating what had to be all the names of all Jersey high school graduates ever to redirect them to wealth management services and medical tourism sites.