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part 1 of the story
Plurality of Nothing

Skylar Ruprecht

TERMS OF SERVICE:

    PARA is a social media application, professional development service, electronic commerce hub, publishing conglomerate, military contractor, and aquifer extraction enterprise. These Terms govern your use of all PARA products and services, including PARA Social, PARA Professional, PARA Dime, PARA Text, PARA Troops, and PARA Glacial, except where we expressly state that separate terms (and not these) apply.
    You understand that, pursuant to the Personal Accountability and Responsibility Act, Pub. L. No. 119-37, PARA must collect, organize, and store personal data (including your birthday, phone number, photographs, contacts, private messages, browsing history, purchase history, and financial statements) in order to identify and prevent possible acts of terror, fraud, and/or malfeasance. Additionally, PARA may use your personal data to generate ads relevant to you and your interests. PARA is not responsible for monitoring or policing the quality, accuracy, or legitimacy of these advertisements.
    You understand that while using PARA, you may encounter content that may be deemed offensive, indecent, or objectionable, which content may or may not be identified as having explicit language, and that the results of any search or entering of a particular URL may automatically and unintentionally generate links or references to objectionable material, including but not limited to: scatological pornography, non-consensual mutilation, socialistic literature, American history, and the like. Nevertheless, you agree to use PARA at your sole risk and that PARA, its affiliates, agents, principals, or licensors shall have no liability to you for content that may be found to be offensive, indecent, or objectionable.
    In no event shall PARA, its affiliates, agents, or principals be liable for personal injury or any incidental, special, indirect, or consequential damages whatsoever, however caused, regardless of the theory of liability.
    Click here to indicate that you have read, understood, and agree to the terms presented in this agreement.

1

    You click without reading, understanding, or agreeing to any of that. You’re pretty sure something else has the first priority lien on your soul. It can’t do you any harm to mortgage it again.

2

     There’s a picture here that half the world says is a blue swine and the other half says is a gold venture capitalist. You see both.

3

    “What’s on your mind?” asks the faded gray font in a rectangular text box. You’re not sure how to formulate the answer. What’s on your mind is a sort of ineffable, implacable existential dread, a list of triaged anxieties that somehow congeal into a tangible atlas stone that makes pacing from kitchen to bedroom exhausting and hums like radio static at varying volumes, though never entirely silent. Student loan payments, pending job applications, NFL standings, the inadequacy of your genitals, the Iowa caucuses, the leaky faucet handle, the long-term side effects of Zoloft, antibiotic resistant bacteria, snow in April, not reading enough, the part in your hair, the pile of unwashed dishes in the left side of the sink, the email you need to send to the parking company that overcharged you, the rec sports league game you need to conjure an excuse to get out of, the time you said “You too” to the server who told you to enjoy your meal. The box tells you you’ve exceeded the character limit.

4

    When reduced to essential component parts on a “Profile” page, your life looks like it could fit into a year, two tops. Too much of it has taken place in the abstract, societal dissent through intentional seclusion and inactivity. Scale the hills of Everest, depose the foreigners’ etymological derivative of “Caesar,” float across the Sea of Tranquility—these are feats once, twice, thrice accomplished whose repetition is tragedy and farce and of less import and intrigue (though more public-facing) than the internal, Socratic dialogue between superego and id, the former of which is strongest on Sundays when the brand itself joins your solo movement to boycott Chik-fil-A.

5

    You search PARA for the names you remember from high school. Everyone’s high school peers are accidents, but they are the yardstick against which you measure your metaphorical phallus. You can’t wish them well because there is a finite amount of success to go around, and their successes, then, are necessarily your failures. True euphoria is discovering that the name of the crush who spurned you links to a fat, unemployed bachelor or bachelorette. You want to comment on their pictures: “I’m doing better than you.” Better than them at what, though? Why is it bad to be single, fat, and out of work?

6

    “fuck AOC” writes a man who has fully devoted himself to the Canadian tuxedo and means it both derogatorily and aspirationally.

7

    Scrolling through PARA, it’s easy to forget that you occupy a physical, spaciotemporal position, upon a mattress whose bedsheets your mother wrongly believes you wash every weekend (because you lie to her because you can’t smell your own funk and you’re incapable of attracting anyone who might be able to); in a room that serves mainly as a masturbation den; with a view of a parking structure where car alarms converse like cicadas in mating season; in a midwestern city that exclusively attracts mid-tier college grads eager to escape good weather and people in perpetual calorie deficits; in a country that (for 250 years) has been called an experiment, which seems, to the better part of the populace, to have run its course; on a planet that about one-third of PARA’s userbase believes to be flat.

8

    Almost none of your pictures were taken by somebody else. But it is a major faux pas to upload pictures of you taken by yourself, especially if those pictures were taken in front of a bathroom mirror, which most of yours were. You’re left to choose between your passport headshot and a photo from ten Halloweens ago, when you went as Nick Fury in blackface.

9

    Three users in a row post the same chain message:

    Hence do I hereby declare forthrightly exclusive dominion and control over my copyright, comprising all fruits of my body (as a result of the Second Lisbon Convention) and improvements on prior art (as a result of the Casablanca Protocol). By the present communiqué, I notify PARA that I deny (and revoke to the extent necessary) consent to collect, distribute, or otherwise commercialize my protected intellectual property. (Anyone reading this should copy and paste this text EXACTLY to their PARA profile. This will trigger jurisdiction in the International Court of Justice under the United Nations Charter, § 1003.86(b)).
    You replicate the message on your profile.

10

    The biggest issue in the country right now is that police keep killing unarmed Black men and getting away with it. Some people think this reflects deeply entrenched racial animus. A smaller, but louder, contingent argues that racism ended on July 2, 1964. These groups go to war in the comments sections beneath presumably apolitical cat videos.

11

    All of your relatives born prior to the Clinton administration sign their posts with their full names and dictate their thoughts via speech-to-text applications that sometimes mistake the words “iced tea” for “pussy.” Sometimes these relatives fail to pause the recording function on their applications, so their messages continue into a postscript in which they thank the application and then say something like “search PARA for non-GMO hemorrhoid cream.”

12

    The text box still wants to know what’s on your mind. You concentrate. “Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet.” You’re cognizant that you’ve plagiarized it from somewhere, but if you don’t know where, isn’t it as good as an original thought? “Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together.” You’ve stolen that one too. Original thoughts are hard to come by these days. You don’t find any on your mind.

13

    The kid from high school who you only remember as an adjective or satellite of more popular classmates, who tried to justify his pejorative use of “gay,” “ghetto,” and “retarded” as subversive political statements and picked his nose when he thought no one was looking and carved intricate, life-size (though probably not in his case) penises into every desk and bathroom stall door is touting his investment in a decentralized cryptocurrency that he claims will supplant the U.S. dollar and usher in a new era free from global hegemony. The price of one coin, which features an image of a one-eyed chimpanzee in a Pink Floyd t-shirt sniffing its own ass, peaks at $300 USD before plummeting to zero, and all of this happens in about 45 minutes.

14

    A celebrity who’d had a tertiary role in a moderately successful 90s sitcom publishes a screed on the evils of abortion. His post contains a picture of a dolphin fetus above the bolded words: “Abortion Stops a Human Heart.” Thousands of nobodies flood his account to tell him he’s retroactively ruined their childhoods.

15

    People are sharing a clip of a former Washington Post op-ed columnist and bestselling author of “One State Solution: Ending the Palestinian Occupation of Israel,” who now hosts the number one podcast in America, appearing on the number one cable news show in the world to decry that she is being silenced by a cadre of amateur fact-checkers who always show up in her mentions and highlight her misstatements. A young woman comments on the clip: “This bottom-up censorship has to stop!!!” A man replies to her: “Good to see your still doing well deer. Call your uncle every once in a while. I’m just sitting on the porch drinking some pussy. Have a great day. Love Reggie Patterson. Thank you. Janet Jackson Super Bowl 38.”

16

    You’ve stubbornly refused to consume the latest pay channel, prestige drama that everyone is talking about because you secretly believe that anything that appeals to a plurality of your fellow countrymen is necessarily intellectually and aesthetically bereft. Through a form of cultural osmosis, you’ve learned the show’s conceit: a high school vice principle hires the mob to whack her superior; to remunerate them, she sells videos of her feet to horny fetishists behind her husband’s back. Somehow this is not a comedy. It is praised for its gritty realism. You are the only person on any of the six majorly populated continents who finds the premise absurd. At this point, it’s almost like you and the rest of the internet no longer speak the same language. Into otherwise normal conversation, people shoehorn lines like “You give us an inch, we’ll take your foot” and “My pinky toe is the fucking breadwinner,” which you gather come from the recent batch of episodes. You posit that the entire show is just the director’s way of sating his well-known foot fetish, but you have no proof. All you know for certain is that the lead actress is conventionally beautiful, so she has to use a foot double for the fetish scenes.

17

    You finally discover what’s on your mind. “Why is zero plural? How can there be multiples of nothing? How can I have one donut, but zero donuts?”

18

    You receive a push from one of your seven rideshare delivery apps offering 50% off any two-topping medium pizza from Papa John’s if you order within the next 60 seconds. You scour your room, sifting through Styrofoam boxes, takeout containers, and greasy brown bags for evidence of your previous Papa John’s pizza, on which you ordered either sausage and onions or sausage and black olives. You retrieve the receipt. Black olives. You’ve missed the 60 second deadline, but you order two sausage and olive pizzas anyway, one for dinner tonight, one for lunch tomorrow.

19

    While you’re up, you grab an empty, plastic water bottle and urinate into it. It’s not like anyone knows you do this, and the trip to the bathroom is an extra 15-20 steps, plus there’s at least a slim chance you’ll guilt trip yourself into washing your hands, and during that 20-30 seconds, you’ll be blind to your PARA feed’s scrolling memes, personal grievances, and unconfirmed reports.

20

    Apparently, hot singles in your area want to meet. What they want to do next is anyone’s guess. Debate the geopolitical consequences of admitting Ukraine into NATO? Rob a convenience store? Heckle a comedian? Schedule dentist appointments and cancel them at the last minute to manufacture the perverse sense of relief that comes from bailing on dreaded plans? Form an LLC? Lie fully clothed, back-to-back, in a twin-sized bed and text other people belated birthday wishes? Kiss all the frogs in the tri-state area to make sure none are cursed princes trapped in amphibian form?

21

    You sign a petition to expand the Supreme Court. If it gets 100,000 signatures, the President has to consider it. You can name all the Justices who comprise the current Court. You know their alma maters, and that includes high schools. Their faces inexplicably materialize in your imagination (while you’re waiting for an app to download or a page to refresh) with the same frequency as your extended family. You preferred it when they were amorphous silhouettes relegated to your unconscious mind.

22

    A notification informs you that your donut post has received 20 “likes.”

23

    Your ninth-grade biology teacher (who attended every female student’s graduation party and tried to coerce them into the nearest hot tub) writes in hypertext that scientists have discovered a 24th chromosome. You click the blue text, and it takes you to a video of Rick Astley singing “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

24

    “R.I.P. Brad Pitt” is trending on PARA. Brad Pitt uploads an image of himself holding a fresh newspaper in response. Most people conclude the Clintons killed him and replaced him with a body double, who uploaded the image in question. A few dissenters argue that Pitt has been dead since Fight Club, and it was River Phoenix (who is not dead) who killed him. You aren’t sure, but you order a gold coin commemorating Pitt’s life anyway.

25

    Your sympathetic nervous system misfires and pumps unwelcome adrenaline through your every capillary, the fight-or-flight response that an Übermensch experiences in the throes of military combat, but which, in your case, has been dulled by luxury and responds solely to false alarms: a lingering heterodox political thought, the pneumatic hiss of an idling school bus outside your bedroom window. It makes your toes flex and wriggle like independently minded tentacles, shoves you down WebMD rabbit holes until you’ve self-diagnosed every autoimmune disease known to man. You realize that you’re wasting your life. A horrible, regularly scheduled epiphany, a daily midlife crisis that suggests, mathematically, you won’t live past 55. You tear your shirt off and rampage through your apartment and author a holographic will bequeathing your exorbitant debt to Elon Musk because you’re certain that your heart is about to burst through your ribcage.
    You remember the therapist you saw when you were still on your parents’ health care. “Find purpose in the little things,” she’d told you. “Adopt a plant.” You’d bought a potted cactus and stuck it on the windowsill in the guest bedroom and forgotten about it and found it dead four months later, needles shed on the carpet. “Transport yourself to the happiest time in your life,” she’d also suggested. You recall the notification about your donut post and take a deep breath.

26


27

    Lowkey and open and notorious alcoholics alike are participating in a viral trend, filming themselves dumping Russian spirits down storm drains to protest Eastern Bloc imperialism. Foreign liquor is not your vice, and you’re unsure of the economic implications associated with purchasing a product just to destroy it in protest. And the Kremlin probably gets the gist from the hundred or so videos uploaded in the last two to three minutes anyway. But you have to wonder how much Stoli it takes to get a sewer gator drunk. The last thing this country needs is a cavalcade of inebriated reptiles zigzagging across the interstate highways and prowling through freshman dormitories with insidious, carnal intentions.

28
    Michael Bay is confirmed as director of a special-effects-heavy, big-budget adaptation of Othello set in present day New Orleans. PARA users decry the woke casting of Michael B. Jordan in the titular role.

29

    Your donut post is up to 115 “likes.” A triumphant organ plays “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee” in your brain.

30

    Your rideshare delivery person drops the pizzas at your front door and buzzes your phone. You never interact. The app asks if you want to donate a dollar to the Bay of Pigs Survivors Fund. You click “Yes.” The app asks if you want to donate five bucks to the Alliance for Menstruating Individuals Without Graduate Degrees. You click “Yes” again. The app asks if you want to donate ten dollars to the Wal-Mart Employees Welfare Contribution Plan. You click “Yes” once more. The app asks if you want to leave a tip. You do, but you have no money left for one.

31

    The first bite of pizza dislodges a mental note you’d tucked away after your last order: Black olives taste like tire rubber. They ruin the entire pizza. Even if you pick them off, they’ve already somehow contaminated it. Get onions next time instead. You distract yourself with a video of a bald man reacting to other people’s reactions to the top ten most shocking moments from classic television. Fifteen minutes later, you’re scripting a vitriolic comment on the inexcusable exclusion of Omar’s death from The Wire, off-hand searching a now-empty pizza box for another disgusting slice.

32

    The author of an overlong series of children’s books that have become the lingua franca for an intellectually and emotionally arrested generation of upper-middle class non-profit community outreach associates was recently quoted in a magazine article, suggesting a transgender-led conspiracy to render lesbians extinct. Her inconsolable fanbase agrees to refer to her by the name of one of the villains from her own series. You picture her drying her eyes with 100-dollar-bills and wonder why people on the cusp of their first colonoscopy haven’t read any other books.

33

    You stumble onto a Christian dating forum where disciples are debating whether a woman can lose her virginity via anal sex.
    “Of course not,” one commenter writes. “There’s no sacred connection between the penis and rectum.”
    “The Bible forbids sex before marriage. Anal sex is sex.”
    “If anal sex is sex, then ketchup is a vegetable and getting old is time travel.”
    “Webster’s says ‘virginity’ is the state of never having had sexual intercourse.”
    “There’s no possibility of intercourse between knob and derriere.”
    “So you’re saying all homosexual men die virgins?”

34

    There has been a significant uptick in violent crime, but no one is blaming video games or indie rock, which dampens the allure of all but the most effected entries in those genres. The country’s top pop psychologist, who looks like Sideshow Bob gone gray, now speculates that polyfluoroalkyl substances are the true culprit. You order a set of non-stick frying pans and contemplate a mass shooting.

35

    A private message appears on your screen. WTMJ’s 5 o’clock news team wants to interview you. Their viewers demand answers to this donut conundrum. You agree to pre-tape a segment that will lead into Jeopardy’s Tournament of Champions, which is to feature a rotating cast of guest hosts who all portrayed Batman on stage or screen, with a hologram of Adam West moderating the two-part finale.

36

    You consume a long-form video essay on the sociopolitical implications of a live-action Nickelodeon program from the mid-aughts. An entire generation’s class consciousness was triggered by an episode wherein the main characters sabotaged each other’s bid for the title of “Assistant Manager,” which did not correspond to any increase in hourly wage. A graph demonstrates a sharp uptick in membership in the Democratic Socialists of America at the exact time the Nick show’s primary viewership reached voting age.
    Of course, there was a sharp uptick in membership in everything at that time. All of humanity had renounced integration overnight and decided to splinter into discrete categories evocative of the old feudal tyranny. Now everyone exists in one of four boxes across two axes according to their affiliation with stratified streaming services, grocery stores, political action committees, and Patreon subscriptions.

37

    Your donut post has now received 1,271 “likes.”

38

    You wonder what temperature human bones liquefy at. Do you need to search for the answer in private browsing mode? What will they think if they see you’ve inquired? Who are they? Why are they omnipresent, like a dull ache in a rear molar? How do they have time to contextualize every frivolous search? Will they leave you alone if you also query: “I’m not trying to liquefy human bones; I’m just curious”? Do they work in shifts 24 hours a day, 365 days a year? Are they assigned specific individuals to monitor? 1,100 degrees Celsius. You enter a new search: “What reaches 1,100 degrees Celsius?”

39

    You consider calling the police and filing a missing person report because a beloved reality T.V. gameshow runner-up hasn’t posted on PARA in three days. It sometimes feels like you’re closer to celebrity social media accounts than your own immediate family.

40

    A video emerges of someone asking Professor Noam Chomsky why zero is plural.

41

    Your donut post reaches 20,000 “likes.” Your lips spread wide. Old, plastic cheek creases reappear, forming into opposing angle brackets. Smiling, you think. This is called smiling.

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