Joshua Cohen - Four New Messages

But now still abed, after ending the phonecall, tugging his computer close and keying in monomian —typeable with two fingers, every letter but one kept to the right of the keyboard — he found a third.

The blog was called Emission.

The link was that optimistic bright blue that after Mono clicked would turn to the drab abused and nameless color of vomit.

The post’s heading, RICHARD MONOMIAN.

Mono withheld his vomit.

He scrolled to the end and the post was signed with that single name, Em, timestamped midday the day before.

But just as he was about to read the whole post from the top his computer emitted a pop — his father was messaging him over chat:

Greetings Diran!

That was Mono’s birthname, before Richard.

Why are you not returning my calls?

Mono messaged:

cant talk now dad, then deleted.

Mono messaged:

its rich dad, then deleted again.

His father messaged:

Diran it is my hope you are not ignoring me.

Mono clicked the chatbox shut, blocked his father from chatting.

He read on:

Friday night @ party with RICHARD MONOMIAN. He brought ‘snax.’

Wink! wink!

Thats what he does for a living. He brings snax that are OK priced but also of crackhead quality.

Anyways.

Were all just hanging out smoking getting our drink on telling stories about former bfs and gfs when RICHARD MONOMIAN tells us this story.

About another party he went to.

A high school party.

Now when the guy who brings the snax begins doing the snax and telling stories about high school you know its time to bag for home but for some reason we didnt.

This was spring break, end of senior year.

Before P’ton, obvs.

It was a big houseparty at a big house with the hosts parents away — remember those?

It ended with everyone oblitermerated passed out on random beds in random rooms and RICHARD MONOMIAN searching around for an empty bedroom to crash in.

And he found like a guestroom or spare for using the computer or phone in room and there was a bed in the corner or like a foldout sofa.

A girl was sleeping.

RICHARD MONOMIAN said he didnt remember her name but even if he had remembered it and told me I wouldnt repeat it, thats not my style.

RICHARD MONOMIAN said this sleeping girl was cute, I guess not cute enough to rape.

Instead he pulled his pants down below his ass tits and pulled down his underwear also.

RICHARD MONOMIAN grabbed his penis and stroked — he stood over her and stroked it!!

Dick fisting his shit! Dick fisting his shit!

Dick grabbed his hard dick hard and below him the girl kept sleeping.

He was on MDMA I think.

I think ecstasy and weeds.

Highlarious!

Suddenly he came: RICHARD MONOMIAN blew a load that landed in her hand.

RICHARD MONOMIAN said he didnt wipe it up because he didnt want to wake her, he just pulled up his underwear and pulled up his pants and fell downstairs and out the door for home.

Thats it.

All the deets I have.

Retardedly I didnt take a pic of him last night and cant find a pic online but Im sure one of my readers can and if you can then fwd: because I sometimes need a pic to look at to get less horny, Subject line: because I sometimes need a pic to look at to get less horny,

(And if youre that girl who woke one morning on a strange sofabed in a strange house with a jizzy palm worried about what happened, maybe you ran out to get tested, maybe you ran out to get the pill — this is it, youre welcome, be careful where you fall asleep, sista.)

At least his pic wasn’t available. That was the best benefit of his previous anonymity.

Mono tried to remember what pics of him were around. Not many, few digitized. School portraits, a few snaps with friends moved away to colleges, and family poses, most of which his father had storaged. Easier to imagine a picture of yourself than to imagine yourself. He thought, why is it so hard to remember colors? And did anyone else think of death while being shot for an employee ID? (Besides the passport the only photo of himself he had was just that, from that week pretzeling at Quaker Mall.)

He stayed in bed, blowing through what cash he had left ordering to his door medium pizzas and Asian noodle decoctions waiting for Methyl to call with his next assignment as the legitimate world with its legitimate rewards stopped calling, stopped responding to his calls — him sitting up in bed, with the pillow verticalized between his legs as stuffed buffer between computer and any Monomians to come, searching himself, researching his name, “within quotes.”

Three results went to four when another blog he suspected this Em of hosting linked to the Emission, then four upticked to six when two readers of those blogs linked up from blogs of their own.

Sometimes it was just an embed singly described, Disgusting, other times it was a capsule blurb that transclused: Em, a college girl from Jerzee who’s been keeping a party diary, writes about a guy masturbating on top of a sleeping girl … NSFW.

But that was a particularly responsible example and most of the keywords were rather: Wrong, Sinister, This is just totally scrotally insane.

People thinking this funny precisely because it was legend, social lore — it didn’t happen to them:

next time sleep with an umbrella

next time my girls not in the mood im gonna give her a monomian

cumbrella lol!

wear rubbers!!

Within a week a hundredplus results all replicated his name as if each letter of it (those voluble, oragenital o s) were a mirror for a stranger’s snorting — reflecting everywhere the nostrils of New York, Los Angeles, Reykjavík, Seoul, as thousands cut this tale for bulk and laced with detail, tapped it into lines, and his name became a tag for abject failure, for deviant, for skank.

To pull a Monomian.

To go Monomian.

Fucking Monomial.

No one, had you asked them, would have thought he was real. Only he knew he was real. And he only knew that, he thought, by his suffering.

Mono was on the internet all day but did not masturbate. Porn sites went unvisited. He’d type in half their addresses then stop and delete, hating himself because the computer couldn’t hate him instead. The nonjudgmental nature of technology, if technology could have a nature — that struck him as unfair.

He restrained himself from leaving comments on Em’s blog or from responding in any way by starting to blog himself because already people were posting under his name, were posting as him: Richard_Monomian, Rich_Monomian, Dickhardmon, Monosturbator69, each claiming to be “the real meatspace Monomian.”

IRL I jerked in my own hand then inseminated her preggers (wrote Modick).

Actually the bitch was so passed out I gave her an anal alarmclock (wrote Dicknass).

The more the commenters commented, the more accurate even their inaccuracies felt, the more their elaborations felt essential.

The weekend after losing out on a janitorial job then failing to obtain two other minimumwage positions (jeggings folder, organic waiter), Mono began searching for something else, not for this proliferating porno about himself but for a number of basic variations: “how to get something off the internet,” “how to remove stuff from the net,” “slander on the web,” “info on online defamation and how to fight it,” “how to destroy a website entirely forever,” “is destroying a website technically legal if the work is contracted to someone in another country,” “how to knock out someone’s server if you don’t know anything whatsoever about hacking or even what servers are.”