Nothing Tonight

Pinned thread: "Today." (3 days ago, 6,812 replies)

cold_open_77 · 12:41 AM · 301 likes: Where is it??

mothlight · 1:18 AM · 440 likes: This is the worst acting I've ever seen. If you're going to do a bit, do the bit.

m_aurelius_jr · 2:02 AM · 520 likes: Index update: Commitment 4.9 → 2.0. Do not announce a date and then go to bed.

velvet_hour · 2:57 AM · 266 likes: Honestly kind of relieved. Also kind of furious.

He refreshed the page at midnight, and again at a quarter past, and again at half past, and by one in the morning the motion of his thumb had become a habit with no thought in it, a small tic, like biting a nail.

The room on Pruitt Street was dark except for the screen. The laundromat had closed early for the holiday, and its sign was unlit for the first time in months, so that the ceiling, which was used to the long yellow wash of the dryers, was a flat dead gray. Asher sat on the bed with a pillow against the wall and his laptop on his knees and an empty bowl on the blanket, and he watched the thread climb. It climbed all night. By one it had passed six thousand replies, and every one of them said the same thing in different words.

Where is it?

Is it tonight? Midnight? Is it soon?

Okay, I'm going to bed. Wake me.

He did not go to bed. He was not tired. He had never in his life felt less like sleep. The excitement of the day had stayed in him, like a coal that would not go out, and he sat with his mouth dry and his heart tapping, waiting for the white mask to speak.

At two he got up and put on the kettle. He stood in the narrow kitchen while it boiled, and listened to the silence of the house, and the tick of the pipes, and the faint rumble of a truck on the highway beyond the rooftops. He made tea. He did not drink it. He went back to the bed and picked up the laptop and there was nothing.

At three, he was still there.

He had begun to bargain. He said tonight, he thought. He didn't say what time. Tonight could be until dawn. But at some point after three o'clock, with the tea cold and the curtains going gray at the edges, he felt the thread begin to turn under his fingers, as a crowd turns at the end of a bad game. The jokes began to sour. Diva behavior, someone wrote. Honestly this is why nobody takes this place seriously. The same people who had written, six hours ago, that they had not slept, now wrote that they had been right all along to be skeptical, and that it had always been a hoax, and that they were going to bed.

At ten to four the room fell silent.

Asher looked at the empty page. He had a feeling that he could not at first put a name to, a hollow, flat, sulky disappointment, like that of a boy whose birthday has been forgotten. He closed the laptop. He lay down on his side with his knees drawn up. It occurred to him, as sleep began to take him at last, that he was going to be tired at work, and that it was Exterminators' fault.

…

At nine on Saturday morning the group chat was already full.

Priya: I SAID.

Priya: I said it was fake, I said it on day one, I said it in a CAFE, in public.

Marcus: ok ok ok. you were right. a crowd of 6,000 people got played by a man with a drawing hobby. what a world.

Marcus: honestly, spectacular scam. a three-week buildup and then NOTHING. incredible. I respect it.

Priya: it's not a scam, it's a hoax, there's a difference, one of them wants money

Marcus: it wanted our ATTENTION, Priya. attention is the new money

Asher read them lying on his back with the phone held over his face, in the thin flat light of a late Saturday morning. There was a smell of toast from the apartment below. A radio was playing, and a woman's voice was reading the traffic, and the whole city seemed unbearably ordinary.

Noah: I haven't posted. I didn't want to say anything.

Priya: noah?

Noah: I think I'm just glad.

Marcus: glad of what, buddy

Noah: that nothing happened.

He read that line slowly. The three dots rose and fell, and then Noah wrote nothing more.

I thought it was a good story, Asher typed.

Marcus: lol the lawyer's in mourning

It was well constructed. The pacing was exceptional. I'm only saying that the ending was a failure of nerve.

Priya: you're being weird

I'm not. A narrative ought to resolve. You can't promise a climax and then withhold it. It's a failure of the contract between author and audience. He typed it with a flush of heat in his cheeks, harder and faster than he had meant to. It's lazy. It's cheap. And it cost us three weeks.

Marcus: it cost us three weeks of what, exactly, Asher

He didn't know. He lay there for a long time with his thumbs over the glass. He had a sense of being obscurely cheated, of having paid for a ticket to a show that had been cancelled, and, behind it, of a thing that he would not examine, an unease that was not about the show at all. He put the phone face down on his chest.

Priya: Asher?

Priya: you ok?

He turned the phone over and typed, Fine. Just tired. Good story, bad ending. That's all. He sent it, and put the phone away, and stared at the ceiling for a time with his lips tight.

…

On Sunday he went to the office.

It was not required. Hargrove had said nothing about the weekend. But he had a feeling that he could not be alone in the room any longer, and he had told himself that there was always work to do, and so he took the subway downtown at eleven in the morning, in the empty cars, past the stations with their gates half shut for the holiday. The building was almost deserted. A guard in a blue jacket nodded to him in the lobby. On the fourth floor, three lamps were burning in the whole expanse of cubicles, and a vacuum cleaner droned somewhere out of sight.

He worked for two hours, to little effect. At one, hungry, he went down to the canteen.

It was open. It had a skeleton service on Sundays, for the lawyers who came in to catch up, and there were no more than four people in the long bright room, each at a separate table with a laptop and a sandwich. The steel counter gleamed. The big pot stood on its burner in the back, steaming. Behind the counter, in Tomas's place, in Tomas's white apron, which was too large for him and had been hastily tied up at the back, stood a thin young man with a mustache, ladling soup into a styrofoam bowl and looking at the clock.

"Soup?" he said.

"Please."

He took the bowl to the corner table by the vending machines. He set it down. He took out the phone and propped it against the napkin dispenser, and there was nothing on it, and he looked at the nothing, and picked up the spoon, and tasted the soup.

It was thin.

It tasted of hot water and a bouillon cube. There was no salt in it, none at all, and the potatoes were still hard in the center, and a skin of pale grease floated on the surface and shone under the fluorescent tubes. He tasted it again, hoping to be mistaken. He put the spoon down. He felt an anger out of all proportion to the occasion rise in him, a hot ridiculous anger, the kind that a man feels at a stalled elevator, and he pushed the bowl away.

"Excuse me," he said, to the young man at the counter.

"Yes?"

"Is this the soup of the day?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"It's not very good."

"Okay," said the young man, with a kind of weary neutrality, and looked at the clock again.

"Where's the usual cook? The older one? He's been doing it for years."

"Tomas? He's off. Some family thing, I think. Out of town." The young man shrugged. "I just got called in."

"Well, you ought to season it," said Asher. "A pot like that, you have to build it. You can't just..." He made a vague gesture with one hand. "It tastes like nothing. Like water. People can tell."

The young man looked at him without expression. Then he took the ladle from the pot, and held it up, and let the soup run back into the steel in a long thin thread.

"Sure," he said. "I'll put it in the suggestion box."

Asher walked out without finishing the bowl. He felt cheated again. He rode the elevator to the fourth floor in a foul mood, and sat at his desk, and the mood followed him there and settled on his shoulders, and by the time he left at five he was angry at the soup, and the cook, and the thread, and Marcus, and Noah, and the woman at the traffic desk on the radio, and at the whole flat disappointing world. It never once occurred to him to wonder why.

…

On Sunday night he opened the forum before bed, out of habit.

There was nothing new. The thread had slowed to a trickle. The big pinned post had slid halfway down the page and had been replaced by a quarrel over somebody's lighting. He scrolled to the account. He clicked on the white mask, on the small round avatar, and the profile opened, plain and sparse, with its six-year history of comments marching down the screen in white type. He had read all of it. He knew it better than he knew the Pelham file.

At the top, beside the name, there was a small gray line that he had never paid attention to, because until now it had always said the same thing.

Last active: 2 days ago.

He read it. He frowned. He sat looking at the words for a while.

In all the weeks he had been watching, there had never been a gap longer than a few hours. Exterminators had posted at nine, at ten, at midnight, at breakfast. He had posted the morning of the day itself, at two minutes past seven. And since then, since the afternoon of that Friday, there had been nothing at all, no comment, no like, no sign. The white mask had simply stopped.

He's sulking, thought Asher. He's embarrassed. He's gone to ground.

It was a satisfying thought, and he held on to it, and shut the laptop, and turned out the lamp.