Yours, Lydia Mixner (Doctoral Candidate)
The signature linked to MyCrosstoBear.blogspot.com, where my mother-in-law analyzed “evidence” “proving” that the historical figure known as Jesus of Nazareth was not, in fact, the Son of God.
This mission was Lydia’s raison d’être. On various visits, clippings from Biblical Archaeology Review concerning the possible found remains of Jesus’s biological half-brother had been presented to me as if by a district attorney. I couldn’t count on two hands the number of articles I’d been emailed explaining that the term Son of God was, in Jesus’s time, a common way of referring to a righteous person. One year, Lydia gave me a book called The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany for my birthday. As a half gentile on my mother’s side, I bore the brunt of her findings. I typed a reply.
Dear Lydia,
Michael is MIA. I guess he hasn’t crawled back up your shriveled cunt after all. Not sure where else to look.
Kisses, Wendy
I hit delete and tried Michael’s phone again. I did not leave a message. Lillian called me into her office.
She said, “You look like shit.”
So much for denying the body’s betrayals. I picked up a coffee mug and absent-mindedly attempted to sip. The mug was filled with pennies. I placed it back atop Lillian’s file cabinet and hoped she hadn’t noticed.
“It’s alright, don’t worry. Just unbutton your shirt to distract from your face and you’ll be fine.”
“Are you joking?”
“Am I?”
I told her I didn’t know, that it was hard to read her tone.
“Look,” said Lillian. “Just keep the money in mind. If this works you can do all the pro bono your clit-boner desires.”
She showed me a photo on her phone of a twenty-three-year-old she had a date with later that night. We wished each other luck.
Michael
It turned out Ricky was still up, sniffing the remains of last night’s party, sifting and sniffing, licking inner Ziploc to usher him into the workday. On the table were a couple of crack stems.
“Take a hit,” Ricky said. “It’ll make you sparkle.”
I waved his offer away. “A little early for me. Or maybe a little late.”
“The problem of our generation,” he replied. He wore a droopy undershirt, tuxedo pants, and suede loafers. Suspenders hung down around the backs of his knees. The rest of the outfit was scattered in pieces across the room: jacket draped over couch-edge, cuff links collected in ashtray, bow tie on table.
“Always late,” Ricky continued. “Late Capitalism they call it. Really we’re late for capitalism. But what’s it matter, so long as I’m on the winning end, right sweet Sammy?”
He blew a kiss at his conquest, a shirtless young guy sprawled out on the couch. Not a bad performance for 8 a.m., post–sleepless night, still glowing from the glory of it all as sun poured in the window, world faded to white.
“What’s with the bracelet?” I asked, referring to a fiberglass ring around his wrist. The bracelet looked like an avant-garde watch that lacked hands and had the letters SD embossed on its face.
“The future,” said Ricky.
“South Dakota?”
“Cold.”
“San Diego?”
“Sykodollars, Michael.”
“Right,” I said, and remembered where I’d seen one before: on my dad. The Sykodollar was the currency of Shamerican Sykosis, an Augmented Reality game that I’d played on occasion, and that my dad had been playing obsessively for years. Like a cross between Monopoly, SimEarth, and Pokémon Go, SS was an open-source world where players won and lost money on in-game bond markets, then used that money to augment public space. Walking through through Manhattan in AR helmets, players were privy to a massive panorama of user-generated content, from jewel-encrusted halal carts, to buildings overlaid with fractals, to giant stainless steel tendrils raised above the East River, braided through the inter-borough bridges. Last week’s New York Times Magazine even featured a cover story on Shamerican protest art, including a downloadable plug-in for replacing signage lettering—such as on NBC’s Rainbow Room marquee—with an all-caps #METOO, and an AR-enhanced Prospect Park memorial honoring the victims of recent mass shootings.
Bracelets like Ricky’s, I remembered, held thumb drives containing the algorithmic passkeys for users’ accounts. Despite originating as an in-game tender for players of SS, Sykodollars had become a universally traded cryptocurrency. The only way to access your SD was with these mathematically complex and non-replicable passkeys, and if they got stolen there was no way to get them back. Most SS players kept these passkeys on their phones and computers, but players with big bankrolls were targets for hacking, so it was safer to keep the keys in safes or deposit boxes or even, for the paranoid and fashion forward, on their persons.
A while back I’d read a piece about the SS creator’s initial vision of the game as a commentary on the gamification of capitalism, its users vicariously participating in otherwise inaccessible markets by trading stocks and renovating buildings in the same way sports fans could throw down virtual dunks in games like Parquet Gawds. But this ironic economy had taken on a life of its own, growing beyond the game’s boundaries and leaking back into the real world where users exchanged its untraceable currency for contraband. For a while, Sykodollars were a rising commodity, but the market shifted, and their value dropped. My dad mentioned it every time he called to borrow money, promising the SD would recover and he’d pay me back. This had been going on for years.
“I thought those things were worthless?” I said.
“You’re thinking in linear time,” said Ricky, a reminder that he was high on crack. Sammy laughed. An erection stretched his sweatpants to their tensile limit. Ricky noticed as well.
“What on earth did people do before Viagra and Cialis and Levitra and Stendra?”
“I think they slept,” I said. “Slept and worked and only had sex when they were actually aroused.”
Sammy said, “Sounds boring.”
We were on the white leather couch, feet on the white leather ottoman or buried in the white fur rug. White was a statement. The statement: sleazy. Ricky’s motto: style over substance. The style: Las Vegas. The substance: anything ingestible.
I leaned over the mirror-table. My eyes were yellow. Smears of dried blood spread across my neck and cheeks. I dumped the contents of the Duane Reade bag, my pathetic contribution to the pharmaceutical pot. At the store, it had felt ripe with promise, but now my cache seemed insubstantial. Sammy snagged the Sudafed, crushed one with a credit card, snorted.