Web

You have a hunch that one of your coworkers at the small academic press is troubled.

You have this uncanny ability to sniff out the troubled, and you feel comfortable only around them—the unabashedly troubled, the masochistically troubled, the adorably naive about the extent of their troubles. With a desk situated just behind your coworker’s, you can’t help but catch little glimpses of her particular brand.

Is it the deep, wide-eyed respect she displays for authority figures, and the way her body slumps in self-loathing and disgust after the curtains of such displays can close? Is it those paranoid whac-a-mole eyes? Or the quiet-bordering-on-nonexistence she relegates herself to in group settings? Those red-raw nail beds rimmed with trenches where skin once was? Or is it her almost-everyday ritual of Googling some delicious silver fox, clicking on the latest link, then disappearing into the bathroom to break things up and snort them?

The last time she tripped off to the bathroom after one of these sessions, you discovered that the old man on the screen shares her surname.

Sure, there are paper shortages and typos to fix, but her troubles can’t all be work related.

She has all the hallmarks. She’s a bastard, like you. And she has an unhealthy obsession with the man who knocked up her mother.

You sidle up to her desk. You can smell she’s wearing the same perfume—the one all illegitimates wear, the one that never goes out of fashion.

“Want to grab a drink sometime?” you say.

She drags her sleeve against her nose. “How about tonight?” You beam at her. “You are singin’ my song.”

What are the odds that not one but two fatherless women have slipped past the gates and risen through the ranks of a small academic press?

It all starts after work that Friday in Flatiron. You’re bonding over caipirinhas and daddy issues.

“But not in that way,” she says, doing a heavy-handed hussy.

“Eww, no, never that.” You flash a wily smile.

Funny how your self-definition changes depending on whom you’re hanging out with. Call it a survival adaptation. With her, you’re the high-functioning abandoned seductress. With others, including Google, you’re the polite thirty-something gender conforming fact-checker, mostly Caucasian with a little something Kardashian in the eyes. There are so many labels. They make you feel. . . claustrophobic.

Weirdo that you are, you like bugs, and everyone, for whatever reason, knows it. You’re the one colleagues come to if anything with six legs or more is found skittering among the baseboard dust bunnies. They think you’re Kevorkian for bugs or something. In truth, you’re more of an Underground Railroad.

You’ve always clung to the edges of things, like a spider or roach braving only the corners, never venturing out into the open range where it’s open season. You’ve always been a little afraid of getting found out.

It takes exactly ten seconds to find out, what rotten luck, that you got the deadbeat dad and your coworker got the brainy one who is literally everywhere on Google. Her father is a lauded writer. Other than fentanyl, you’re not even sure what your dad does anymore. Her dad left to magnify his selfdom; your dad left to chase liminal states of self-erasure.

You’re not sure which dad deserves the award for Most Selfish.

After your third caipirinha and after confirming your shared illegitimacy, you start to feel very comfortable. You want to get to know her better, so you suggest a game. You’re too old and outwardly conformist for dares, so you play a little truth game with algorithms. To keep it topical, you both Google “father” on your personal devices.

You scroll past Merriam-Webster’s flaccid definitions, past the Rotten Tomatoes review on the latest Anthony Hopkins flick. You both click “See more” exactly five times, and then, because now you’re really getting into the cesspool of the psyche, where the most revealing truths fester, you trade Google treasure.

“Father John Misty,” she coos.

Uh-oh, you think, squinting in horror at your own screen: “New Braintree woman accused of stabbing, attempting to kill her father . . .”

“God the Father—Church of the Most Precious Blood,” she interrupts, burps.

“You little fibber,” you say. “Let me see that.”

You grimace at her screen. She wasn’t lying.

You try to control your face.

“Your turn.” She sounds impatient. Why?

You feel beads of sweat forming at your hairline. “Father of six-month-old Topeka girl charged with her murder.”

She gives you a look like you’re something she’s found on the bottom of her shoe.

“‘Father Time,’” she says, “by David Sedaris.”

“Abusive Father Can’t Wait to See the Art He’s Inspiring His Kids to Create.” You snort.

She pauses, considering you.

You’re all nerves, giggling. Maybe her workday bathroom jags are allergy induced.

“How are you so well-adjusted?” you ask.

She shrugs, rubbing her bloodshot eyes. “Therapy?”

Ah, you nod. Ah. Maybe your radar is faulty. Maybe she’s been lying to you all along.

You can tell your body chemistries are no longer processing the liquor as “fun.” It’s time to part, before bad blood spills between you.

“You spend too much time on The Onion,” she says.

“Could be.”

With a yawn, you pay your tabs and go your separate ways—you to Queens, where you’ll take a sharp object to your wounds, her to Brooklyn and her meditation cushion and her advanced silicone scar gel.

Left to your own devices, you Google her dad again and tap into a web of bibliographies. Here you find spun cocoons of information on this guardian of the word, this flayer of fake news. He’s really stuck in the metaphorical web.

You click on the Images tab: a skeptic’s squinty eyes, mouth frozen in the middle of a quote parceled for Goodreads, the fuzz-heavy jaw of a man who slings alphabet soup for a living. He’s got a lot of surface area, which helps with the sticking.

The Videos tab is cluttered with hours of lectures and interviews, intellectual moltings forever preserved in amber. If there were any question about his contentiousness, you need only look at the thumbs situation to find there are as many downs as there are ups.

It seems impossible, but he’s even credited with coining a term—misogynoir—on Urban Dictionary. Which, by the way, defines “father” as “that person [sic] that was never in ur [sic] life.”

Her dad is verified on TikTok, merchandised on Etsy, juxtaposed with heroes in a trove of Marvel memes. He’s hot, too, in that TILF sort of way.

Enough. Enough, okay? So your jealousy is warranted, and Google is a meta–torture chamber.

Some fathers are very Googleable, but that doesn’t make them lovable. For all you know, the two are inversely correlated.

Why do you care so much?

You dig deeper. Google defines some fathers as freedom fighters defending their sovereignty against invaders. Google defines other fathers as war criminals, eating lies and feeding lies and shitting lies. Google defines the doctor who patches up both the freedom fighter and the war criminal as a father without borders.

Some future fathers founded crypto, while others sparked forest fires at gender-reveal parties.

A few fathers’ names are memorialized in a single search return: the high-school sports news archives; the university commencement program; a wedding page on The Knot; a raging Amazon review; an obituary survivor; an obituary loser.

Google is a catacomb for the living.

And everyone knows that catacombs are 97 percent cobweb.

But some fathers have never really stuck. Is this nonstuckness a triumph or a failure? Is it a sign of a father’s being so lamentably average that he has no assets to contribute, save for the Facebook account in his name that links to the faceless avatar behind which creeps and trolls hide? Or is this lack of participation—this deferred donation to the blood bank that is Google—a willful omission?

Some fathers get only one hit per day, and that from their personal devices. Others manufacture their own Googleability—creating Squarespaces for their pipe dreams or GoFundMes for their edible cannabis start-ups.

Some fathers have an accidental metaexistence in the posts of others; they weren’t given a curatorial role. They grapple with the haunting fact that the them that sticks is the unscrubbable one, entombed in clickable code and comment for all eternity.

A minority of fathers have NFTs made in their image and likeness. But the vast majority of dads, IRL, are fungible, disposable. The need for reliable replacements is ubiquitous. Why else did television give us Tony Soprano and Walter White? Why else did colonizers give us God?

Because some fathers, in the lives of their children, are little more than photobombs.

Back at the office on Monday, you invite your coworker for a postprandial coffee at Devoción. She’s reluctant, but you are persuasive. The café is packed with your generation’s version of the yuppie. After twenty minutes in line, chatting about the vagaries of April weather, you finally get your drinks—she an oat-milk latte, you a drip coffee, black—and luck out on a table near the door.

You’ve always felt you can be more honest when surrounded by exposed brick.

“Listen, I’m sorry things got a little weird on Friday.” You tell her you’re not sure why you played that silly Google-search game. You hope it hasn’t short-circuited things.

“I don’t think you’re weird.”

“There’s something about caipirinhas and my constitution.”

She squints, lapping at the bonnet of foam in her cup.

“I’m not a violent person.” You laugh. “I mean, I don’t know why Google thinks I am. I’m not.”

She’s one of those people who can raise one eyebrow at a time. “I need no convincing,” she says.

“Okay, good.” You feel your shoulders relax. “Now that that’s cleared up . . .”

“I just don’t like people all that much,” she says, looking around the café, her eyes darting.

You chortle. “I have a tough time with people too.”

She’s still looking with those whac-a-mole eyes at the other patrons, and you recognize, in the restiveness of her gaze, the street urchin, the war amputee, the hostage. She’s been through it.

“But you’re different,” you tell her. “I feel naturally drawn to you, even comfortable around you.”

She bites the lip of her cup. “But can you really trust people?”

“Hey, life is a scratch-off.”

She’s looking wilted. “I’ve learned the hard way. I can’t go any deeper than this, okay?”

You force a smile. Where is this going?

“You think you want to be my friend and I might think the same and I’ll get close to you and feel I can trust you and tell you my whole story. And I can’t do that. Because then I’ll feel bad about telling you my whole story and then . . . Then I’ll have to disappear and find a new job or, like, destroy you . . .”

“Whoa, whoa . . .”

“. . . before you destroy me, because I’ve given you the keys to do so.”

She must be off her meds. You look at her wearily.

“I don’t let anyone, especially coworkers, get my playbook,” she says. “It’s not a thing I do anymore.”

She has foam on her upper lip. You wipe your lip by way of a hint.

She wipes hers. “Thanks,” she whispers.

She pops the lid back on her latte.

“So, you’ve destroyed people before, then.”

“It’s hyperbolic, but you could say that.”

“Because you told them about your daddy issues and then regretted it?”

She screws up her face. You realize that over Friday’s libations, you didn’t get far below the surface on this topic. You realize that you don’t know this person in front of you at all, that you’ve dreamed her up. What do you really know about her daddy issues? Why have you assumed your abandonments are alike?

“Don’t delude yourself,” she says.

Wow, this coffee break is really escalating. As is your habit when the thermometer gets hot, your thoughts begin to drift.

“You think we have something in common? You think that’s a reason to forge a friendship? Everyone has daddy issues, okay?”

You start daydreaming about eastern black widow spiders and their daddy issues. Before he can abandon her, the female eats the male in her first post-coital meal. The father’s body literally becomes nourishment for his offspring. Do black widows grieve? you wonder.

Your coworker is waving at you. Hello?

“Sorry.” You straighten up. “Right, everyone has issues. No reason to become friends.”

“Don’t misunderstand me,” she says, walking things back a little. “I’m just not interested in wallowing.”

“Me neither.”

“But that’s kind of why you’re attracted to the prospect of my friendship. Isn’t it?” She narrows her eyes, but her tone has become casual. “You want to do some trauma-bonding. You want a sister in misery.”

Hasn’t therapy taught her the dangers of the accusatory use of “you”?

“No way! I, I feel misunderstood.” Use “I,” not “you.” “That’s so far off the mark.”

It’s like she doesn’t hear you. She’s having a conversation with herself.

“I’ve come to terms with the reality of my relationship, or lack thereof, with my father,” she says. “I’ve made peace with it.”

“Then why do you Google him every single day?”

She looks stunned, hurt. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

You’re so good at this. You dole out psychic pain with surgical precision. This self-righteousness, this need to set the record straight, it always does you in. Already here comes that old feeling—the guilt.

She’s standing in front of you. Her eyes are wet, lip trembling.

You never even needed her playbook. You’ve had it all along.

Now she’s gone.

Here’s the truth: you hate yourself. Here’s another truth: you would be Googling your father every single day, too, if he were at all Googleable.

But hell, your father is impossible to find. When have you ever searched your dad’s name and not gotten the response—Did you mean: glockenspiel?

He must be here somewhere. You scour usernames in Grubhub reviews for restaurants in his various zip codes. You creep through the intimacies of Venmo transactional feeds, deep-dive Instagram hashtags. You spelunk sub-reddits that might cater to his limited interests. You even click to Pornhub. You quickly navigate away.

On Google Maps, you enter addresses in notoriously squalid spots in his hometown and drag the little yellow man into alleyways where you know bad things have happened, hoping his figure of loft and lank might have been loping around the same day the Google car drove through. But the only thing remotely resembling your father is the figure of a dog lazing in front of a garage door, its face politely pixelated.

Why do you engage in this version of self-harm when there are others that are so much more instantly satisfying? It keeps needling at you, this itch you just can’t scratch. Why do you try so hard to find him? Has he ever tried so hard to find you?

He must be here somewhere. You are a gainfully employed fact-checker, come on. You search various iterations of the multitude of names your father goes by, but he hasn’t stuck, not anywhere. And then, just as you’re ready to give up this futile quest, you return to a trick an old librarian taught you. You add quotes around his first and last name in the Google search bar on a day that it’s decorated with spiderwebs and jack-o’-lanterns. But this time you type the word AND, then the word arrest.

You take a deep breath because this is it, you can sense the omen in the blinking cursor. You press Return. In the lag, you imagine the hit hurtling through corroded wormholes and web strands calcified from a quarter century’s worth of searching.

Then Google gifts a list of links. The first (the only pertinent one) delivers you to the arrests section of your hometown news site, archived material from a time when Tupac was still kicking it. You see column after justified column of wrongdoers and wrongdoing. Among the columns you find him, sealed in a wrongdoer’s cocoon.

How mortifying, you think, covering your mouth, suddenly relieved he was so goddamn hard to find. But, pause, what if this reaction is like most uncivilized reactions in civilized times—impulsive, premature, unfounded . . .

The dusk settles on a small neighborhood park with benches, a swing set, monkey bars, and a slide. This time of year, the bronze husks of cicadas litter the tree bark.

A baby, two years old, sits on the lap of her mother’s lover—who, according to Google, is a repeat offender—and her mother is MIA. The wind is whipping the branches. Some of the cicadas are dead. For the others, the clock is ticking. Their song is battered about on the gales, a mesmerizing alien chorus. The baby’s in distress, screaming, tears rolling down her face.

Maybe she’ll grow into a little girl who is afraid to touch the curious exoskeletons that cling to the trees. Maybe she’ll get over her fear and learn how to gently unclip them and drop them into her jacket pocket, the first specimen receptacle of every budding biologist. She’ll appreciate the realness of their husks, the fragile remainders of their too-brief lives. With fascination, she’ll research what Google has to say about cicadas, that en masse they emerge from the ground once every seventeen years.

As it turns out, the mother’s lover who is not the baby’s father is forcing dry bread crusts into the baby’s mouth—packing them in, down her throat.

Why? Why is he doing this? you wonder, already knowing the answer. Some people are born sadistically troubled.

Maybe the baby will flower into a clever, bright young woman who catches on early that, surprise, she doesn’t have to eat the shit some men are compelled to feed her.

For now, she’s a baby and she’s choking.

You gasp. This hurts. You can feel your adult throat tighten, corroded and calcified from a quarter century’s worth of searching. This is what memory feels like.

Coming on the scene, just past the sandbox, is Dad, and his sidekick brother too. They hurdle the benches. They carry millennia of suffering in their DNA—biblical hurt, immigrant hurt, Other hurt—all of which can be found in various states of mummification on the World Wide Web.

There’s no time to sling threats or roll up sleeves. The cicadas are chirping. There isn’t much time. There never was.

They unpack their hurt onto this repeat offender. What sweet relief, to unleash rage on the deserving.

There are no pictures, or YouTube videos, or memes. Just the flat facts of the police blotter. They help you remember, as if it were yesterday, as if babies have reliable memories or any memories at all.

You hear the chorale of cicadas emerging from their chthonic birthplace, their song something genre-fluid—first horror, then action, now ode. You see how germane the color of the world is, something like a black-and-blue. You feel the wind sweeping the tears right off your cheeks. And you see the lines in your father’s face—a worried webbing that looks like love.

Where did they put the baby during the showdown? Where did they put her when the police escorted the three men away in handcuffs?

Where did they put the baby?

But where else? They stuck her on Google. She’s still there.

A lot of fathers are Googleable for their reckless displays of masculinity, the pyrotechnics of a hormone rush. A lot of fathers are little more than sex and fist. Statistically speaking, a not insignificant number of fathers are locked up for life.

But your dad, master of the disappearing act, walked free and stuck just once. He showed up for your story in ways only Google could tell you about. And maybe that’s all you were hoping to find.

He was a hero in a cameo role, and Google the evidence bag, tamperproof, catching all his love.

All fathers are bits of code, bequeathing and withholding legacies. A rare thing is a father who doesn’t hide his love away. Whose love does not come to us in blips and too-slow morphine drips—in algorithms designed to keep us clicking.

In less than a week’s time, your colleague’s workstation has migrated to a different part of the office.

She sits behind you now. And this is what yuck feels like.

You’ve left an apology card, one of those with the anthropomorphically sad rain clouds, in her work mailbox. You’ve sent an Uber Eats gift card to her Outlook address. But she won’t make eye contact, not even to glare, not during meetings, not passing in the hallways.

Then one afternoon you hear the frantic scrape of a chair leg against the floor, her voice addressing a colleague—“How did it get in?”

Furtively, you crane your neck to see her bent over in her chair, scratching at her ankle, groaning, “I can’t stand them.”

You turn back to your screen, pouting. There’s the Word doc of the manuscript you’ve been fact-checking. There’s the Google window open with countless tabs you’ve been toggling between. You wade through the swamp and crag in search of the facts buried among the fictions. And you are exhausted from guilt and from grief.

You’re tired of the panopticon of Google. Why does it seem to know what you want to know before you know you want to know it? How dare Google dress itself up as Borges’s Aleph, professing to offer the seeker a glimpse of everything in the universe, simultaneously, from every vantage, without overlap, obscurity, distortion?

Google has made trophies of us all.

You feel misunderstood. You want something you can touch, know with your own senses to be real and true. You want to witness events happening in real time, not embalmed in King Tut’s tomb. You want to be a mover and a shaker of things Google will never grasp, because they’re too small for Google to see as significant. But they are significant.

That’s when you hear the whine, the shrill Doppler effect of a mosquito whizzing past. A call to action.

You’re up out of your chair. You see its flimsy outline, the glint of a diaphanous wing, zooming toward her workstation. Toward the scent of her blood, which sadness has made sweet.

Must you really reason with yourself about what you’re about to do? The mosquito: it’s a parasite. It sucks blood, causes itching, breeds disease, and as far as you know provides not a single benefit to society. In 2020 alone, Google tells you, the mosquito killed 627,000 people, most of whom were young children in sub-Saharan Africa.

You creep after it, hands at the ready. The mosquito is closing in on her. You have to move fast, but not too fast. Otherwise, when you bring your hands together, the current of air will shuttle the little sucker to safety.

Steady, steady.

No, the mosquito is not simpatico. The mosquito’s got to go.

Steady . . .

Your coworker spins around in her chair at the blitzkrieg sound of your hands crashing together, so near to her head.

You open your hands to show her.

Is that gratitude carving its design upon her face?

“Got ’im,” you say. “Got that bastard.”

Read more from Issue 20.1.