Emily Mitchell - Viral - Stories

After that there were break-out groups, then lunch, then a series of panels of people from various disciplines — psychology, sociology, communications, technology — who had studied the phenomenon of 5/17 and tried to illuminate the reasons for its occurrence or to develop reliable methods for preventing something like it happening in the future. The session that I attended was chaired by a psychoanalyst who claimed that the problem was that this generation of children had been raised to view their lives as renewable; cyberspace had fundamentally confused the development of the self-protective ego instincts. The children believed they could simply restart the game when it was over, and so the concept of death had become abstracted to them, vacant; it had ceased to have any sense of gravity.

A man stood up in the back row.

Are you telling me that I raised a son who didn’t know the difference between a video game and reality?

Perhaps not consciously , the psychoanalyst replied. But, yes, somewhere deep in his unconscious, there was a flaw, a fatal error, buried and forgotten, waiting to explode.

Bullshit, said the father in the back row and left the room letting the door slam behind him.

There seemed to be similar disgruntlement with the other professionals who spoke. I passed a group of mothers who were all talking angrily about a social psychologist who had told them that the problem was the isolation in which people now lived. The anxiety of parents about their children’s safety had caused them to curtail the freedom of their children to roam and to have “unstructured” time. As a result, the only genuine playing that these kids did was online, where they built extensive and elaborate networks of trust and interaction stretching far beyond the boundaries of their physical communities. These kids had been conclusively demonstrated to feel pressure to conform and to gain the respect of their peer group, as they did in conventional “real world” peer groups. But the rules for how to do this were different in these widely dispersed networks and worked on a consumerist model — the only model these kids were familiar with. Since the usual measures of social value in American society (wealth, beauty) were stripped away by the medium, the only thing left by which children could measure success or failure was simple: quantity.

So they felt that they had to have more friends than anyone else; and then they needed to show that these weren’t just names on a list but real, genuine bonds, people whom they trusted and who trusted them back. People to whom they were connected in some deep and ineradicable way. What could they do to demonstrate this bond? Well, the evidence was before us all.

The mothers were outraged. They absolutely rejected the man’s explanation of their children’s deaths. He was disrespectful, unfeeling, a crank, a charlatan.

It occurred to me that, really, people didn’t want an explanation of what had happened. They wanted it to remain a mystery now and forever. This was understandable. Any theory that thoroughly and adequately accounted for the May 17th Fires, as they were known in the press coverage afterward, would reduce all these people’s particular children, whom they had loved and cherished as unique, to something standardized, identical, the same. It would erase the individuality of each child, which was all they had left now: the way, for example, Annabel, my niece, loved the word “exceedingly” when she was a child, how she pronounced it as if there were four e’s in it— exceeeedingly . Or how she used to show me her gymnastics every time I visited. Or how she used to climb up the tree in her backyard and hide among the branches until someone came to find her. That was before she turned into an almost-teenager who spent all her time in front of the computer in her room.

Any wholesale explanation for 5/17 would mean that, as far as it affected the most important matter of their young lives, all these different children might as well have been the same child, raised by the same parents. No one wanted to accept that.

This was why, I think, the conference fell apart at the end of that first day. The chaos broke out when the poet Lisa Romini-Malone got up to read the long poem she had composed for the occasion. She was not herself a Parent of 5/17 but, she said, she had close friends among those who’d lost their bright hopes for the future and she felt she could channel some of their pain through the profound act of empathy that was writing.

The parents sat attentive. Ms. Romini-Malone began to read. I think it was at the line: Burning forth in a magnificent fire / Their young and precious hearts that the trouble began. Or it might have been when she said: Planning in secret / The message passed from hand to hand like signal fires. There was a murmuring in the hall that grew until it began to drown out the speaker at the front. Ms. Williams stood up and asked the audience for quiet. A woman called out from the third row: She’s celebrating this, like it is something great that happened! Like it was something beautiful, and after that there was no quieting the room. What the poet said was lost in the angry, undifferentiated roar that came from the until-then polite and contained audience. It was a sound like the ocean rising up in a storm to burst over the land, unreasonable, unreasoning and bottomless: the sound of grief. As if united into one force, the parents rushed toward the podium and toppled it and then kept going, out into the carpeted halls of the hotel, knocking over ficus plants and tables, smashing lamps, tearing the deliberately inoffensive art down from the walls.

I stayed sheltered in a recessed window of the room with some other journalists until the main energy of the riot had made its way out into the corridor and the main lobby downstairs. Then I followed at a distance, watching from the mezzanine balcony and taking notes for the story I would write and file later that evening. Soon, from outside in the street, there came the undulating sound of sirens as the police pulled up in front of the hotel.

As I watched them storm in through the doors and push the mass of rioting parents back with their big, Plexiglas shields, I remembered, suddenly and vividly, the May morning, almost two years earlier, when the telephone woke me with its bleating and it was my sister on the other end screaming how something had happened to her daughter. I remembered how I turned on the television to the news and saw those first, terrible images that everyone knows now so well.

And I remembered how a few months earlier than that, when my sister was concerned that Annabel was spending so much time with her computer instead of with her friends, I told her not to worry. Annabel was just shy like I had been at her age, she would grow out of it, she would be fine, I said. You have a tendency to over-parent just like Mom , I said, feeling pleased with myself for speaking plainly to my older sister, standing up to her. Leave Annabel alone. She’ll be okay.

Then May 17th arrived. All across the world, children executed what they’d organized in secret, never speaking of their plan out loud and communicating only with a network of others whom they knew just as words and images onscreen, by email, on discussion boards, through cell phones, in coded messages and downloaded, encrypted files, so that just before 11 p.m. EST, they left their homes and climbed whatever they could find that was tall enough, carrying those useless homemade parachutes that one of them, no one would ever know who, had designed.

Some climbed water towers; others went onto the roofs of houses or apartment buildings. One boy in Tucson climbed up the inside of the enormous tilted dish of a radio telescope. A girl in San Francisco pulled herself onto the railings of the Golden Gate Bridge. They took their places in the dark. They waited for the hour to arrive. And when it did, they lit the fireworks they’d tied onto their ankles or wrists or stuffed into their backpacks and launched themselves out so that they all blazed up in a single moment and then plummeted burning through the night engulfed by flames before they hit the ground and burned and guttered there like candles laid out in remembrance of something, then forgotten.