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part 2 of the story
Plurality of Nothing

Skylar Ruprecht

42

    A New York Times reporter private messages you. She wants to understand the “Zero is Plural” movement, wants to know how it connects to inflation, bingeable television shows, and the proliferation of QR code restaurant menus. Will it be endorsing anyone for president? What’s its racial makeup? Is the aim to make zero singular, or is it just an awareness campaign?
    A PARA search highlights the reporter’s recent bibliography, including one piece subtitled: “A Voice in my Head Makes the Case to Re-Elect the President,” and another called “Media Groupthink and the Shape of the Earth.” You tell her you’ll only divulge your secrets at a restaurant that serves water in glass bottles.

43

    Another message, this one from a prominent religious leader:

    The devil lives within you. The plurality of zero is, of course, the work of God, a persistent reminder that all things are duplicative and redundant save the one, true Holy power. Renounce your sins and retract your post or suffer forever in eternal hellfire.
    This desire to democratize and normalize the foibles of man makes sense coming from a zealot who’s had a redundancy of wives and is looking to diffuse the blame.
    You reply:

    Zero is Arabic

44

    “Why is zero plural?” is already being falsely attributed to Mark Twain. No one has ever said more things that they didn’t say. Or maybe he did say it. Maybe he said everything. Maybe he sat at his kitchen table with a dictionary and a notebook and spoke every combination of words into the ether so no pithy quip could ever be misattributed to him. Maybe everyone’s done the functional equivalent. With enough ellipses and bracketed tense changes, you’ve probably said most everything there is to say as well. “Four . . . score . . . and . . . seven . . . years . . . ago . . . etc.”

45

    Someone wants to know why there are more vacant homes than homeless people in the United States. Someone else wants to know why they always spoke in a deeper voice when the teacher called on them in class. A third person wonders why city sidewalks are equally wide regardless of population density. “Colonialism,” you respond to all three.

46

    PARA is oversaturated with a meme called “Hard Luck Hank,” the form of which evokes Mesopotamian parables in which a malevolent djinn intentionally misinterprets an ostensibly clearly stated wish to the wish caster’s detriment. Each meme features a high school yearbook photo of an acne-riddled brace face with an unnaturally wide, slack-jawed smile. The text above him conveys something apparently positive: “Is immortal.” The text below turns that on its head: “Sentenced to life in prison.” Everyone on the internet has had a laugh at Hank’s expense, implicitly accepted that he probably took the picture as a joke, probably lives a well-adjusted life working in middle-management, probably uses the fact of his celebrity to seduce women in nightclubs. “I was horribly depressed at the time,” he now recounts in a recently-released interview. “I kept a loaded gun beside my bed. I tried to overdose on Tylenol. I was smiling so big that day because I’d decided to drive my truck off a bridge.”

47

    Your donut post breaks 100,000 “likes.”

48

    The CEO of Dunkin’ USA issues a press release:

    

49

    People on PARA like to preface their posts: “Unpopular Opinion.” What follows is almost never unpopular, and quite often, not even an opinion. You believe this speaks to something in the culture, an unrelenting desire to designate one’s self a glorious dissenter despite an otherwise majoritarian affinity for pay-to-win phone apps, food trucks and craft beer, and referring to pet dogs as “children.”

50

    You come across a stylized image of your own face—an ode to Jim Fitzpatrick’s famous send up of Che Guevara—plastered like a Big Brother poster on the “JOIN US” page of an organization calling itself People for the Abolition of Zero and Tax-Exempt Status for Non-Abrahamic Religious Organizations. The group is currently debating whether they are for tax exempt status for non-Abrahamic religious organizations or for the abolition of that status. Members break about 60/40 in favor of abolition, but the dissenters threaten to walk and create their own, more clearly titled group. In the chat, they all refer to you as the OP (Original Poster).
    “OP would never support a Taoist’s right to withhold income tax,” one woman says.
    “OP is a Taoist himself,” says another. “Lao Tzu visited him in a dream and presented him an empty donut box that prompted his revelation.”

51

    A member of the Kenyan National Assembly places a bounty on two male lions photographed engaging in tender nuzzling and copulation. Somehow, the blame falls on student organizers at Oberlin College in Ohio. If they hadn’t tried to cram their homosexual agenda into every conceivable field of study, the lions of the Serengeti would have stayed God-fearing and demure.

52

    You hear commotion on the streets outside your bedroom window. You enter your city’s name into PARA and scroll in search of an explanation. Nothing justifies the sudden cacophony. Now it sounds like laughter, but according to PARA, nothing funny has happened in your entire state for at least two days. You estimate the distance between your bed and the window. The laughter gives way to contentious banter. You settle on conserving the energy it would take to peer out into the world. Whatever the people out there are doing, they’re wrong. Hadn’t they heard that Hard Luck Hank attempted suicide? Didn’t they know that a man with two penises would be answering the internet’s most frequently asked questions for the next hour only?

53

    Your donut post has been “liked” over 300,000 times. For the first time, you consider the effect those few sentences may have on your life. Will prospective employers treat you like radioactive material? Will you be too inflammatory a figure to shop at Walgreens without sunglasses and a fake mustache? Will you ever escape the feeling that everyone on every street and in every building is scrutinizing you? Was that your one moment of notoriety, which everyone is promised at birth? Had you wasted it on a PARA post?
    You probe your PARA “Friends” list for a conversational catcher’s mitt who will let you air your first-world grievances without trying to offer solutions or perspective. You read the entire 30,000-person catalog up and down, but you’re not particularly close with anyone on it.

54

    Another online movement, Redistribute Zero, has appropriated your likeness and started doxing Ivy League professors of mathematics. Their stated mission is to put zero back in the hands of working Americans.
    “The top 5% of all households in this country own 97% of the plurality of zero. The whole point of OP’s post was to call attention to this injustice.”
    “We have to reclaim our rightful share of zero through collective bargaining and industrial sabotage.”

55

    The Susan B. Anthony Right to Life and Semi-Automatic Weapons is in a tizzy over your post.
    “What OP is trying to tell us is that we’ve had a plurality of abortions. He’s using donuts as an example, but he’s suggesting that it’s actually women who’ve had one and exactly one abortion who are doing the least harm.”
    “So what do we do?”
    “Terminate a pregnancy by any means necessary unless you want to burn.”
    “I’m too old to conceive! I didn’t know!”
    “Seek out a surrogate. I’m told that for as little as $50,000, you can find a fertile woman who’ll carry a child to the end of the first trimester and then exterminate it on your behalf.”

56

    The man with two dicks says he’s never let them touch. “Do you think I’m one of those Kenyan lions? Does anybody else wonder why our so-called president hasn’t done anything about that yet?”
    On a rival PARA forum, a person with zero dicks is also taking questions. “I didn’t know I had so many until I read OP’s post,” she writes. “I really thought, for all intents and purposes, that I was a eunuch until today. I hated my mother until about 25 minutes ago, but now I see that my father was the problem all along.”

57

    The Detroit Lions announce that they’ll be hanging 60 championship banners, one for each Super Bowl they haven’t won. “We’d like to thank OP for restoring our franchise’s sense of pride,” says GM Victor Nada. “We’ve certainly been more successful than teams like the Seahawks, with their one Super Bowl title.”

58

    A journalist from Vox wants to know if it’s true that you wore blackface to a Halloween party 10 years ago. He’s got a photograph that appears to confirm as much. You feel as if he’s reached his hand into your bank account and swiped two or three zeroes, like he’s left his own seat at the table and started eating off of your plate. You respond with animal instinct.
    “I could swat you like a fly, you little shit,” you write. “I have NEVER worn blackface in my life. If you so much as hint that I have, I’ll sue you into oblivion. Your children’s children will be paying off your debt. DO NOT contact me again unless it’s to apologize.”

59

    You deadbolt your front door and tilt your blinds to suppress the natural light. Self-preservation tastes like blood in your frothing mouth. You prowl the apartment, lurch from bedroom wall to wall in ankle-high athletic socks and boxer briefs, pounding your chest, and “dislike” three videos of dogs welcoming their solider-owner’s home from active duty. Just because.

60

    Someone in the group “OP’s 0,000,000,000-Man Army” asks why every conversation in their community has to devolve into childish, sexual innuendo.
    Another person responds with two emojis, one of an eggplant and one of a cherub.
    “This is exactly what I’m talking about,” the first commenter explains. “I didn’t say anything about having sex with children.”
    A different member quotes the new comment in his reply: “I’m . . . having sex with children.” He adds an eggplant and cherub emoji as well.
    A moderator arrives and asks the first commenter to leave. “This group is anti-pedophile.”
    “I’m not a pedophile!!! I’m trying to raise the level of discourse, but you all have nothing better to do than talk about who wants to have sex with children.”
    The moderator quotes his comment: “I’m . . . a pedophile. I’m trying to . . . have sex with children.” He inserts three water droplets between his eggplant and cherub and promptly bans the original commenter.

61

    A European soccer match between two cities that make no appearances in Western history or literature ends on an improperly awarded penalty kick. Fans of the losing squad burn down a McDonald’s and smash up all the show models at the local, authorized BMW dealer. Fans of the winning squad flip every taxicab in the city limits and rob the entire gamut of downtown convenience stores at knifepoint.
    On the BBC Internet News Hour, a talking head argues that Somali refugees are violent rapists and zealots who change the natural character of a country like a black sock in the white laundry load. “They dirty our streets and disrespect our heritage,” a female panelist agrees. “And some,” she adds in a conciliatory tone, “are excellent window washers.”

62

    The National Wildlife Association is pushing for reclassification of dozens of extinct species. “OP spearheaded this whole thing,” a spokesperson says. “Our government claims there are zero dodo birds left. If that’s true, where are they, these multiple dodos? We say produce the dodos and let us determine how extinct they really are.”

63

    The Dow Jones skyrockets to an all-time high on the crest of a tidal wave of zero transactions. An article in the Wall Street Journal reports that “a record-shattering amount of inactivity occurred after the market closed on Thursday night.” Nearly all of America’s approximately 300,000,000 citizens executed zero transactions. “For the first time in recorded history, infants in their cradles and prisoners in solitary confinement made more purchases than professional brokers and market watchers. Investor confidence is impossibly high, bordering on delusional.”

64

    A celebrity gossip website publishes the photo of you in blackface. Within minutes, the image spreads around the web like a chain letter.

65

    Al Jolson, Judy Garland, Laurence Olivier, Robert Downey Jr. You repeat the names to yourself like a lullaby. “I’m in good company,” you think. You imagine yourself behind a podium—wifely stand-in five feet back and to the left—gesticulating, pounding the lectern. “I’m guilty of the same crime as Al Jolson, Judy Garland, Laurence Olivier, and Robert Downey Jr. I’d rather be guilty with those four than innocent with the lot of you.”

66

    An associate producer at WTMJ sends you a curt email:
    “In light of recent events, WTMJ retracts its interview offer.”

67

    Over 1,000 people have rescinded their “likes” and instead “disliked” your donut post. In the comments, a jury of your peers debates your culpability.
    “OP is a racist.”
    “Are you fucking stupid? That image is obviously photoshopped.”
    “OP would’ve been like five years old when this was supposedly taken.”
    “I’m so done with white people. Every goddamn time.”
    “OP is mixed race, you retards. He’s always wearing blackface.”
    “It’s awfully convenient that they found this picture of OP right as he was waking us up to the truth.”
    “Why can’t you just admit you got hoodwinked by a charlatan?”

68

    You consider publishing a new post. “That’s not me in the picture. It was taken too long ago; it’s not relevant now. I was too young at the time to know what I was doing. It wasn’t wrong when I did it. I’ve decided to donate $0 to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. This generation is too sensitive.”

69

    Another 10,000 PARA users retract their “likes.” You feel like a car scrapped for parts.

70

    “The Detroit Lions have always opposed appropriative Halloween costumes in all forms. OP’s despicable behavior does not reflect the values of the Lions, our fans, or the great city of Detroit.”

71

    The People for the Abolition of Zero and Tax-Exempt Status for Non-Abrahamic Religious Organizations suspends operations pending investigation.

72

    Your donut post now has 150,000 “likes” and 53,000 “dislikes.”

73

    The author of “One State Solution: Ending the Palestinian Occupation of Israel” offers to host you on her podcast to discuss the trauma of “cancelation.” A popular right-wing talk radio personality lauds your courage in the face of a P.C. mob. Your PARA “Friends” list dissolves like spun sugar in water, and those that remain post exclusively on the subjects of Sandy Hook crisis actors and Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

74

    Another 10,000 “likes” disappear, and you agree to the podcast appearance. Not for selfish reasons but because you’ve come to see the global relevancy of your story, the story of an exceptionally noble person unjustly vilified by a mob of virtue-signaling gender studies majors. You’re just fodder in a game of moral one-upmanship, collateral damage in a culture war to which you conscientiously object. Your life has been ripped out of context; you should be judged according to the content of your heart, your extenuating circumstances, your mitigating factors, all the reasons you should’ve ended up so much worse than this but didn’t through sheer power of will. And what about innocent until proven guilty? Remember that? The First Amendment, too. The God-given right to express yourself without repercussions. Someone needs to impress upon today’s youth the unparalleled importance of these uniquely American values. These kids are trying to turn the country into Salem circa 1692. “If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone,” you’ll say. You’ll remind the podcast audience of “First they came . . .” You’ll encourage them to read 1984, or at the very least cite it ceaselessly in political discourse. Censorship! Cancelation! The criminalization of dissent! The road to Oceania is paved with brigaded PARA posts.

75

    A PARA user discovers that a popular chain’s “footlong” subs actually measure in at only 11.5 inches. The user’s attorney calls this the food and beverage industry’s Watergate. An amateur bodybuilder tells CNN that the subs’ imprecision distorted his macros and cost him his IFBB pro card. A procession of women marches into the LA County Courthouse seeking divorces; the subs skewed their perceptions of length and led them to mistakenly accept their husbands’ declarations of adequacy. A regular customer determines that he’s overpaid by up to 60 cents per day, every day, dating back to, at the latest, early-June 1997.

76

    People post videos of themselves entering the offending chain’s Indianapolis locations and slinging rulers like javelins over the order counters and into the pimpled faces of hapless minimum wage employees. The trend spreads throughout the country and then across the pond where EU servicepersons suffer the more terrible wrath of flying metersticks.

77

    The PARA user who started it all announces that he’s now scheduled to appear on the Today show tomorrow morning.

78

    Activity on your donut post is nonexistent. The “likes,” “dislikes,” and comments preserved in amber.

79

    Dunkin’s systems are up and running again.

80

    You feel compelled to perform a background check on the user who first measured his “footlong.” Something in your gut says he might not be pure enough to front this movement of disaffected fast food customers.
    You scroll backwards in time through his post history. His college years are essentially a series of group photos taken in nearly identical, dingy basements. His senior year of high school appears to have been spent playing a Tetris-style web application. He was on the JV football team as a sophomore. At last, you reach a post he made shortly after his thirteenth birthday:
    Algebra is 2 hard. Wish i was asian lol
    “Wish i was asian”? This is the man entrusted to topple an international chain of sandwich artists? This is the person whose image is plastered all over the fastest growing group on PARA: “The Other Half Inch”? Does no one know his animus for one-third of the world’s population? You have no choice but to expose his ugly past. You copy his words, paste them in the comments section below his “footlong” post, and smile.

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