Jarett Kobek - I Hate the Internet

“Darling, aren’t we speaky many big words about people who are, effectively, teenagers? Aren’t they Emil’s age? If you gave my progeny millions of your dollars, it’d be gone gone gone, Daddy-o.”

“To answer your other question,” said Erik, “I haven’t read Hot Mill Steam. I couldn’t find a copy and then I read the reviews online. It sounds terrible.”

“There are clunky sections,” said Adeline. “I’m not sure that Baby quite understands what it is that he’s doing. Even with all of that, I think it’s his best book. It’s rather better than time travelers suffering from hyperintelligent gonorrhea.”

Baby’s second novel, Saving Anne Frank, really did have a plot that included hyperintelligent gonorrhea.

In Baby’s novel, the World Time Travel Authority infects all time travelers with a mutated strain of gonorrhea that pools in the back of the throat. The gonorrhea is hyperintelligent and capable of carrying on conversations with its host via shared control of the host’s vocal cords.

Time travelers often experience isolation fatigue. So the gonorrhea keeps them company.

Unlike present day gonorrhea, the strain modified by The World Time Travel Authority has no negative physical effects and can not be transmitted through sexual contact.

The protagonist of Saving Anne Frank is a man named Boaz ben-Haim. One of the quirks of the future is that all time travelers are Jewish. According to Baby’s narrative, Jewish culture is the only culture with a realistic understanding of history.

The Ashkenazi handle recent history. The Mizrahim do the distant historical past. The Sephardim handle pre-history. At the time of writing, Baby was ignorant of Beta Israel so Beta Israel have no role in his novel.

Boaz ben-Haim is assigned to Nazi Germany during WWII. He experience produces a crisis of confidence. He decides that must save victims of the Holocaust, a course of action barred by the World Time Travel Authority.

He starts with Anne Frank.

Before Boaz ben-Haim can save anyone, he must rid himself of the gonorrhea.

Boaz ben-Haim believes the gonorrhea is more than an anti-isolation device. Boaz ben-Haim believes the gonorrhea is a spying mechanism. He believes the gonorrhea reads his thoughts and intends to report him to the World Time Travel Authority.

So he travels to the 1970s and gets some penicillin and kills the gonorrhea.

Usually when gonorrhea is removed from the throats of time travelers, it’s done under sedation. Boaz ben-Haim can’t sedate himself, which means that he hears the gonorrhea die in his throat, speaking words with his vocalcords.

In its last moments, the gonorrhea says: “help me, help me, help me. help. help. help. help.”

Then it dies.

When Baby wrote Saving Anne Frank in the mid-1990s, it was very hard to look at America and not feel like its unwitting citizens had been born into complex systems of unfathomable evil.

Americans were destroying the Earth and exploiting poor laborers in their own country and exploiting poor laborers in other countries and Americans were the beneficiaries of multiple genocides and economic horrors that stretched back to the country’s founding.

There was no way out. The only escape was death.

Baby saw Boaz ben-Haim as an American stand-in, as someone who was in a situation that paralleled that of the American people.

Boaz ben-Haim worked for a world governmental body that refused to help people in the past for fear of what their deaths might wreak on the future. This was a terrible moral equivalence which suggested the lives of future people outweighed the lives of past people. By virtue of the past people being dead.

But they weren’t dead. Not when you could travel in time and smell and hear and touch them. When you traveled in time, nothing ever really died. Not even gonorrhea.

Adeline and Erik finished eating. They went outside.

It was 9pm on a Friday night. Valencia Street was packed with human bodies. People came in search of alcohol and food and the illusion that if you combined alcohol and food, they added up to meaning.

White lumbering Google buses drove past.

“I suppose anything is better than writing about gonorrhea,” said Adeline.

“Pardon me?” asked Erik Willem.

“Oh, nothing, darling,” she said. “Every time I see a Google bus , I concoct very strange thoughts.”

“The symbolism is awkward,” said Erik Willems. “I’d have figured out a less ostentatious way of handling the matter. That’s me. I don’t have billions of dollars. I don’t think these buses belong to Google. I think they’re either eBay or Apple.”

“Do you know that sometimes I forget you still haven’t cracked the big four zero,” said Adeline.

“What should it matter?” asked Erik.

Many of Erik’s coworkers knew that he was sleeping with a MILF. They never let him forget it.

How was last night? asked his co-workers. Did the cougar’s claws scratch her cub’s back?

What’s it like tasting that stale cupcake and pastry? asked his co-workers. Is the frosting bitter?

“It shouldn’t. It doesn’t,” said Adeline. “It’s only that I was thinking yet again about how exhausting it is to get older. How miserable it is to see what happens to the lives of your friends. Not your favorite writer, darling. Don’t worry your silly little head over that gunsel. Other than abandoning his early literary principles, our charming author has navigated the waters with rather heap big success. Minerva’s doing dandy swell. So is Jeremy. But there are so many friends who’ve fallen by the wayside, victims of that creeeepy ol’ middle-aged spiritual dissolution. Why, they start as strapping young things full of hopes and poetry and then the grind of life and jobs and spouses and children and mortgages and kids wears them down. Then they can’t even say Bo to a goose. C’est très cliché . I prepared myself when I was younger, I said, ‘Adeline, self, you simply must make certain that you don’t become spiritually dissolute. If you catch the same blurry look as all of Mother’s friends, you won’t be able to spot your own peepers in the mirror, not for all the shame you’ll see.’ What yours truly didn’t anticipate and for which I had no preparation is that the dissolution would creep upon the others. I was so self-obsessed that it never occurred to me the problem would be other people! Think of the compromises and strange choices. All the misery they’ve brought upon their selves. It’s simply exhausting.”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Erik. “My oldest friend is a Saudi prince with a media company and addiction issues.”

“Ah yes,” said Adeline. “My mysterious Arabian benefactor. Isn’t it strange how small the world is? It’s like a Russian novel. And I hate Russian novels.”

“Did you meet Dennis?”

“ Nein , darling, I stayed out of the process.”

“I doubt you could have seen him, anyway,” said Erik. “ Trill was when he was doing another degree at the London School of Economics. Do you know who turned him on to that racket? Saif Gaddafi. Gaddafi’s son!”

“You remember Emil, don’t you sweetheart? My son? Mine own flesh and blood? The one who’d flit away your filthy lucre in a flash? When we talk, sometimes I can’t even hear his words. The only thing I hear is his youth. The eagerness for life. The innocence. I only want to tell him one thing. I simply want to say, Good luck, kid! You’re gonna need it!

“Yet then I rebuke myself. I worry that the feeling is my own spiritual dissolution. But it can’t be, can it? I still feel young. It’s the others who’ve gotten old. Darling, what I wouldn’t give for some friends as wild and maniacal as dear sweet Edward Snowden.”