Jarett Kobek - I Hate the Internet

Looking back, one of the things she remembered most was the sense of dread that arrived whenever Emil handled inflated balloons.

Balloons were a state of existential terror. You waited for the rubber to pop. You waited for the explosion of sound. You waited for your child to start screaming. You waited for your child’s incomprehension about its imploded and disappeared toy.

When Emil turned 12, he began finding Adeline embarrassing.

She could see why.

Don Murphy had optioned Trill. Scholastic was sniffing around. Adeline spoke in a Transatlantic accent. Most people in her chosen field thought that she was a Russian man. Her best friend wrote Science Fiction. Sometimes an actual Russian woman would come over and swear about how capitalism had ruined her vagina.

When Emil turned 13, and it was clear that things weren’t getting any less weird, he asked if he could go live with Nash Mac.

Nash Mac had transitioned out of computer games and was working for IronPort, which had been acquired by Cisco. Adeline didn’t know what he did for a living. She didn’t care. She didn’t ask.

It was hard to maintain a pretense of civility, even for Emil’s sake. Every time she saw Nash Mac’s dumb face, it reminded Adeline of how stupid and pointless it is to be young.

Nash Mac had married another woman and fathered two other children. His new wife had blonde hair and no eumelanin in the basale stratum of her epidermis. Her name was Stephanie. She tried very hard to forge a working relationship with Adeline.

Despite her efforts, Stephanie couldn’t bridge the gap. She and Adeline were very different.

While Stephanie was writing her Master’s thesis on Barbara Kruger at Stanford, Adeline was stepping over dope sick East Village junkies and drawing Felix Trill’s misadventures with amorous cephalopods.

And the shared sexual past weighed on Stephanie’s mind.

Aware of the distance between them, Stephanie spoke to Adeline in an unusually slow and loud manner, which wasn’t that far from how some people talk to the foreign, the blind and the mentally backwards.

This manner of speaking made Adeline assume that Stephanie herself was mentally backwards.

Her responses to Stephanie’s perceived mental backwardness did not foster conversation, as Adeline tended to talk to Stephanie as a person might speak to a favored pony.

“HELLO… ADELINE… YOU… LOOK… NICE… TODAY!”

“Many thanks, darling. You yourself are rather fetching.”

“ADELINE… WOULD… YOU… LIKE… SOMETHING… TO… EAT?”

“Aren’t you just a breath of fresh air? You’re like a mint julep. I could simply drink you down in one gulp, princess.”

“EMIL… SEEMS… LIKE… HE… IS… ENOYING… SEVENTH… GRADE!”

“Yes he does, doesn’t he? We all must enjoy things in this world of ours. I do hope you have some things that you enjoy. You do? Well, aren’t you a good girl!”

Stephanie and Nash Mac lived out in Milpitas, one of the endless California suburbs comprised of strip malls and decaying erotic fervor.

Emil had his own room for the nights that he slept over. Both Stephanie and Nash Mac said that Emil was more than welcome to live with them.

So Adeline agreed.

She had regretted the decision ever since.

Even with the new latitude of movement, the loss of Emil was a sucking wound which would not heal.

“Baby,” she said while visiting Provincetown, “It’s like a creature has ripped asunder my soul. I knew he was going to grow up and leave me but why did it have to happen so soon?”

“For fuck’s sake, Adeline,” said Baby, “Go and take him back. You have custody. You’re his mother. Can’t Suzanne sue somebody?”

“He doesn’t want me,” she said. “He doesn’t want anything to do with the weird life I’ve made for myself. He wants to be with his father and that dreadful woman. She talks so loud, Baby, and so slow. I suspect that she might be mentally backwards. I suppose she’s his new mother.”

“She’s not his mother,” said Baby. “You’re his mother. He’s supposed to hate you. You aren’t supposed to take it seriously. You aren’t supposed to let him move out of your apartment.”

“No, Baby,” said Adeline, “It’s different. I remember hating Suzanne. This isn’t hate. If he hated me, it wouldn’t present a challenge. This is different. He doesn’t hate me. He’s just disinterested in my silly little life.”

Baby rolled his eyes. Of all Adeline’s strange decisions, he considered this the strangest.

Adeline’s mother had left Pasadena and bought a condo in Downtown Los Angeles. Adeline couldn’t imagine Suzanne anywhere other than Pasadena. It was too strange.

Suzanne kept her house but wanted something in the city. Downtown was revitalizing. “It’s gentrifying, Adeliiiiiiiine!” said Suzanne. “All the swinging people are swinging again and they’ve cleaned out all that nasty burned out trash!”

When Adeline was young, she’d loved all the nasty burned out trash.

Now Emil was living with his grandmother. This turned out to be worse than when he had lived with Nash Mac.

At least when Emil lived with Nash Mac, Adeline could see him when she wanted. At least he was still forced to stay with her on the weekends.

Now he’d fallen off the radar. Now he was out in Los Angeles. He didn’t return her phone calls. He very rarely sent her email.

Whenever Adeline needed to hear about the actual details of Emil’s life, she had to call her mother and ask about her son. Whenever Adeline wanted to see an idealized self-portrait of Emil’s life, she would check his presence on various websites owned by multinational corporations.

But she attempted to avoid the latter. She found it creepy to stalk her son’s Internet presence. Emil’s WaNks Index Score was 83.21223121.

Adeline tried to take things in stride. Whenever she worried about irreparable harm to her relationship with Emil, she remembered the years when she wasn’t speaking with Suzanne. And now she and her mother were on better terms than ever.

Besides, what was there to be afraid of?

Adeline herself had been a young waif on the streets of multiple urban environments. And that had been when the cities were dangerous, before they cleared away the burned out trash. That had been when cities were scary and before Internet pornography had anesthetized an entire population.

When she saw Emil’s phone number come across her cellphone, she was thrilled. She answered on the first ring.

“Emil?” she asked.

“Mom,” he said.

“How’s Los Angeles, darling? Are you simply baking in the sunny sunshine with Mommy Dearest?”

“Mom,” said Emil, “You’ve, like, got to stop using Twitter. You’re so fucking embarrassing. It’s totally awful.”

“They’ve been saying some very terrible things about your mother on the Internet.”

“I totally saw what you said about Beyoncé,” said Emil. “All of my friends saw it. Do you know how many people, like, sent me it?”

“I’m sorry,” said Adeline. “It wasn’t my fault.”

“When has it ever been your fault? When has a single thing ever been, like, something that you admitted was your fault? Our whole lives are so fucking crazy and it’s never because of you.”

This was unfair.

As the daughter of an alcoholic, Adeline knew all about people who refused to see the relationship between the course of their lives and their own poor decisions. Adeline wrestled with as much responsibility as she could bear. She knew that her life was her own creation. It was nobody’s fault but hers.

But Emil was young and his mother was dispensing relationship advice on Twitter.

“Your opinions,” said Emil, “are like, really, offensive. I totally don’t know why you’d say any of those things in, like, public.”