6

It’s a disaster, the likes of which she hasn’t seen since Gwami’s death. It’s a fireball sent from the heavens to blow her entire life to smithereens. It’s that big and that raw, and if the metaphorical dinosaurs metaphorically die out, it will be a tragic but consistent course of events. After all, that meteor set off a chain-reaction which fucked up their food supply. Miranda and the dinosaurs, sans their usual nourishment, condemned to die.

And she’s not even being that melodramatic about it. IT: this happening, this latent in a sequence of happenings, the first being that the phone number was a fraud, and this being the second. The phone number worked no better on the forty-seventh attempt than the first, always ringing thrice and then being answered by a shrill, uncommonly-welcoming computer matriarch speaking for all of us when she said, “We’re sorry, but the number you’re trying to reach has been changed, disconnected, or taken out of service. If you’d —” but Miranda never made it further than that. If she had, her boiling blood surely would have entered her brain and caused a stroke  of some sort. She has better survival instincts than you’d think.

And if that weren’t enough, as if the shock and pain from that dead end weren’t enough, as if a tragedy that sent her chain-smoking on the yellow-lit steps of her apartment building (the closest convenience store has, in Miranda’s absconding to another world, been taken over by some Big Banana sympathizer/try-hard, which, as such, sells only banana-related items. This includes, apparently, Big Banana’s foray into the tobacco game: Banana Jacks, the smoking of which make Miranda hate herself even more than fruit-unaffiliated cigarettes) weren’t enough, there was this second, more-horrible thing.

She’s been locked out.

The Program that has been her haven, her adventure, her cocoon and her world, her bosom and her beating heart, the totality and the singularity for her entire post-Gwami life, the only thing she’s had since and all she had wanted or needed, it’s reared back like a thunderstruck horse and kicked her square in the jaw. Miranda, it’s apparently said, your time here is up. 

And there goes the other half-a-pack.

There are only two reasons Miranda would be locked out: 1) she’s failed in her mission, missed over and again all the secret, esoteric clues to the Woman’s whereabouts, meaning obviously the developer has moved on to frying bigger fish; or 2) Miranda already has everything she needs, and further time in the Program would only hinder her. Because her entire life will lose its purpose if her brain allows itself to believe option-1, it throws its full weight behind option-2.

She has everything she needs, and it probably has to do with that number. Maybe she needs to track down its owner. Maybe she needs to call at a specific time of day. Maybe she needs to go to Barbados. Maybe this has something to do with Rihanna.

Defeated and tobacco-fried and feeling the first of what will be many pangs of nostalgia for a world so suddenly far away, Miranda tries the goggles again. She just wants to sit in the hallway, among those doors and think; even if she can’t enter, even if her IP address continues to obstruct her, she has to be there.

Maybe her exile was the result of some bug. Maybe she’ll be welcomed in, no problem. Maybe she’s been freaking out over nothing.

But again and again and again and again, and I could fill an entire page with agains, the Program remains out of her reach. At least it’s concise and clear with its criticism of her IP. Underneath her broken entrance code, a little message reads Account Locked. Please Input Correct IP. Of course, her skeleton key has no effect. It seems she has a 10-digit number to track down if she even wants to continue with this ridiculous, babbling ques —

10-digit number. 

24 – 60 – 255 – 130.

It’s not a phone number. Not 246-025-5130.

It’s a motherfucking IP address! 24.60.255.130! She overthought it! She has all the answers! She has a way forward! She chained all those cigarettes for nothing! Invested a foolish $11.30 in Big Banana’s bottom-line for naught! All she had to do was take a step back and see the banana plantation for the banana plants!

Now, it can’t be that hard to trace an IP address, can it? Can it?

…

…

Yeah, turns out it’s pretty hard.

🍌 🍌 🍌 🍌 🍌

Let’s not mince words: it takes either serious knowhow or buying power to do a thing like trace an IP address, and, since there’s no app for this, and since the dollars aren’t exactly overflowing into her accounts right now, Miranda needs help. Not too tall an order, she’s just got to find someone with a delicate enough touch to not arouse suspicion as they sneak past the thousand-and-one firewalls that guard the big Internet Service Providers — the keepers of such information —, with enough experience to know where amongst thousands of unimaginably dense folders and servers and filetypes the necessary information would be, to unzip and access the correct information, and, of course, with staunch-enough morality that they won’t be spurred to abuse their power and shut down internet access to everyone in St. Louis. Simple.

If she hadn’t been locked out of the Program, she might post-up in some seedy, steampunk place and advertise her needs to the nearest bidder. Funky people do freaky things in that place; it wouldn’t be too difficult to coax someone into obediently fucking around with some ISPs, especially if there’s a whole big chunk of change waiting for them on the other end of the engagement.

But that’s not really an option, obviously. She ain’t have the cash nor the access. And if Miranda were to, say, zip around the proper internet in a tizzy, trying to summon a hacker of the caliber she’d need, it would end in her arrest or otherwise total excommunication from polite society. Besides, those that publicly identify as “hackers” aren’t really the kind she’s after.

She doesn’t want to take control of someone’s Facebook or steal some poor sucker’s credit card information. Any two-bit hackjob with a bot could pull that off. No, the hackers she needs are quiet cats, subterranean detective-caliber-homies who don’t advertise their wares because they’re not up for sale, anyways. Their brethren in qualification are the ones all the terrorist cells and foreign governments use, paying them a pretty penny to do so.

But the ones we’re after are a less ambitious strain of the breed. The black hat badasses working for China are like Orcas, pouncing quick and leaving no flesh on the bone, swallowing and crunching and chewing and moving on to the next meal, marking their territory. They’re in this line of work because they’re after immortality, like any good artist, or because breaking through walls, and feasting on whatever sweet meat lies behind them, gets ‘em off real good. They’re too dangerous for Miranda to wrangle.

Their brethren, however, are quieter leviathans. Meandering slowly just underneath the internet’s crust, they take up mucho space but move in slow berths, awaiting a strong current or the scent of krill to stir them from their floating minutia into action. Nothing less than a ruling from the bonafide court of public opinion is like to catch their attention. They’re the ones responsible for the reprehensible audio leaks of nutjob politicians, Top-Secret government drone-strike statistics mysteriously extracted from their secure-but-not-enough servers. And they don’t leave a trace because they never act as individuals. They do what they do because it’s where the internet is going, because it’s what the culture wants. They’re just fists. They’re slaves to mass marches, lone members of the throng blessed with specialized skillsets. And if it’s one of these behemoths Miranda wants to exploit, she’ll have to find not only the beast of burden, but the trail they’re traveling upon.

Fortunately, Miranda knows a certain cause that, even now, even weeks later, so many would-be crusaders in the internet militia still wave banners for. Even for our recently detached, galactically-minded Miranda, this takes some steeling. Like jumping into an ice bath, it’s not so bad once you’re submerged, but it takes a certain gall in getting there. Miranda takes three swigs of tequila from the Twins’ birthday bottles above the fridge (they’ll never notice), and turns to her task, braces herself, plugs her nose, jumps.Miranda seeks out and submerges herself into the underground forums wherein the calls to #UnmaskGwami, and far worse, first emanated. These are the sprouting sites of the ever-enraged Big Banana loyalists, wild motherfuckers with a bloodthirsty passion for fads and serous internet intelligence to boot. A veritable feeding frenzy, wherein she hopes to hook the big one, boys.

Now, of course you remember Lakshmi’s warnings? About those people who would and could actually unmask Gwami, who could find Miranda, who had sufficient free time and psychotic leanings to, say, lead a mass mob march on Miranda’s apartment were they to find even fleeting information about her real identity? Yeah, these are they. They all have infantile usernames like @shadowlordhexxx and @sycosycosis, but don’t let that fool you, these are a terrifying breed of upper-middle-class white male, pimple-faced and woman-hating. Though worried by its juvenility at first, Miranda’s moniker, lifted from her adolescent social media habits, mollifyingly melds her into the milieu. @MSGothKid666 joins the fray.

So, she heads brashly into the belly of the beast that broke her, planning to divert its vengefulness for her own gains. Although these are tight-knit communities, in their forage for fresh flesh the individuals within sometimes take big bites out of their own kind.

Take, for example, this poor sucker right here in /justice who has very thoughtfully posited for public comment Do you guys think Gwami is like, IRL hot? Or nah, is she like a hag lol?

As if his 380 downvotes weren’t enough to let you know how the Gwami-hating public felt about his message, perhaps this response from a moderator named @JorgenVonDangle will clue you in:

@SweatyHairy6969 [that’s OP’s handle] we’ve been over this, you misogynistic piece of shit. Why don’t you go to /fuckable if you’re going to keep at it with this tired, beta-male, has-been shit. Another one of these and you’re banned, you Roger Ailes-ass-motherfucker.

Bloodthirsty, they’ll devour what they can get, even one of their own. Our moderator, only caring about marginalized communities in the most basic and transparently self-serving of ways, reminds everyone why they’re here, and not on /fuckable presumably, with a newly pinned post.

Hello all. /Justice is a place to discuss and share all the ways we think Gwami the Seer could and should be punished, whether through the U.S. penal system or other avenues. Threats of violence will not be tolerated unless OP could actually make good on them. Any information relating to the #UnmaskGwami initiative should be posted under /Unmask. General Gwami bashing can be found at /GetGwami. Thanks to all for abiding.

What this means is that Miranda must be extremely careful with what she posts, commenting on the general Gwami restlessness with intentional sloth, upvoting with major discretion, but most importantly, legitimizing her presence here with just the kind of obscure Gwami knowledge that only a zealot or a 1st-degree murderer would know.

As the days go on, she gains their trust through sheer volume, masquerading as a kind of hacker herself, one who’s found some underground archive of Gwami’s work and so posts private musings, time-stamped photos from those first videos, on-set and extremely private. Through deliberate mimicry of their ideas, no matter how horrifying or destructive they are, she comes to earn a tenuous respect. Sometimes she’s spoken about in threads she’s never even visited. @MSGothKid666 is the one with the scoop; soon everyone knows that.

With what other time she has, she scrolls. She reintroduces herself to a land she was once Queen of. She picks up on what her classmates are doing, spends hours watching cooking videos for dishes she won’t actually ever make. When the quiet echoes of her empty apartment make her feel especially alone, she finds solace in the few places impervious to the Banana rash. The public library branches are strong hold-outs, and within their coziest corners, she inhales communist manifestos and conflicting timelines of Modernism.

But only between the hours of 9 and 5. If the Twins could even possibly be home, Miranda needs to be, too. She needs them to believe fully in the crippling nature of her illness, afraid that they will find her traipsing out around town, see through her ruse, and obliviously report such a sighting back to concerned professors and administrators. Equally unconscionable is the idea of the two doing Big Banana’s private bidding, unobserved within their shared walls. Somehow Miranda feels that if she can be in the Twins’ presence, she’ll be able to stay up-to-date on any attempts to find or destroy her.

*cough…cough* “Hey, what are you guys doing?”

“Oh, hey Miranda! Nothing much, new assignment. Trying to figure out who Gwami is from these bugged phone recordings,” or maybe “Oh, Miranda, hey! Yeah just work. Work work work work work, you know how it goes. We have proof that Gwami has Neo-Nazi ties, so we’re just trying to figure out the best way to tweet that, nothing too interesting.”

Suffice to say that Miranda would rather be bored than paranoid, so she stays mostly holed up in her room, her ear to the wall, her eye pressed to the crack under her door, on the lookout for stylish boots and the tracks they leave.

Finally, 13 long, repetitive, soul-sucking, deceptive, crude, dubious, sloooooooooow-moving days from when she started this crusade, Miranda finally cuts into the usual anti-Gwami banter with promises of something big, something she’s working on, whetting the general appetite. All this so that later, when she logs on in the dead of night and opens a big ol’ wound, saying “Hey guys, I did it, I found her IP address. If someone can get me a location on this, I can go check it out, but I’m pretty sure this is from Gwami the Seer’s computer,” the masses even way out in the open ocean will get a feverish whiff of sweet, sweet blood. Line in the water, she waits.

And by morning, some housebound dreg, a casual anti-Semite with invasive knowledge of some fat-cat ISP’s private directory, pops back in a (mercifully) private comment and says, “Just for you, @MSgothkid666. The address is 49 West 70th St. Hope the stupid, Jew bitch pisses herself when she sees you.”

Just like that, her work there is done. Affirming her longtime hypothesis, the overly outraged are an easily manipulatable sort, especially in the “safety” of such numbers as these. Big Banana proved quite keen selecting them as their secret soldiers.

Miranda leaves the site at once, rewarding herself for her days of dirty work with a long, positively scalding shower, so as to get the message board grime off her skin. Then it’s uptown without delay. An end to the saga is nearly at hand: The Woman with the Red Hair must be waiting for her there.

The only tiny, teensy, itty-bitty little issue here is that Miranda, her memory as shallow as the internet’s, forgets again that all these worlds don’t just shut down when she leaves them. She forgets that this specific site has users with motivated minds and long lives at which they are the center. She’s absentmindedly left an already rotted corner of the internet an incentive to fester further, and this time with a possible path to its own self-perceived salvation. You see, there are other stories, adjacent stories to ours, told by terrible tellers and full of harrowing heroes, and those stories lurch forward, too. In them, Miranda Swami is but a bit player, a plot mover, her real name unimportant, her manipulation unknown and unnoticed.

In other words, things are happening. Bad news bears.

But of course, that isn’t on Miranda’s mind. What is on our heroine’s mind is the shadow-hidden face of the Woman with the Red Hair. Will she in reality be beautiful, a seductress? Will be she an old, ragged crone? Or will this be another dead-end? Another overthought nugget of information that will lead her to a very confused doorstep, and thus, after much apology and embarrassment, end this stupid squabbling horse-and-pony show for good?

Because, for real this time everyone, this is it. If this is a dud, then this thing and Gwami and Miranda, all of them are kaput.  She’ll drop out of school and steal some money from her folks to go traipsing the world, fucking French girls and drinking absinthe and getting into lightly-European drug trouble like any other confused, twenty-something, rich girl, kid-of-a-congressman would do in a time of crisis. She’ll chalk all of her interdimensional travel thus far up to an elaborate but loosely-controlled practical joke. She’ll start calling herself Wanda.

With all her might, she pushes such thoughts from her mind, assisted in her task by the suffocating subway gaggle amassing around her and the horrible squeals of her stopping, sputtering train.

Lincoln Center, when she emerges into it, is a rodeo of tuxedos and ballroom gowns, long inhalations and expensive doublets and the orgiastic, ephemeral blowings of faraway flutes, oboes, bassoons.

It is not a world Miranda has ever felt comfortable in, especially a Miranda who looks like this: eyes veiny and cheeks blotched, teeth crawling with resilient, fuzzy plaque. She should’ve brushed her teeth again before she came here. Oh God, and she should have put on makeup. Miranda ducks into a Duane Reade, where our closeted kleptomaniac steals some product from aisle three, ducking into the unguarded employee bathroom to use it. The toothpaste goes into her mouth blue and comes out yellow. She brushes again. When she emerges, her eyelashes are twice their usual length, her cheeks rosy as can be.

With a cleaner mouth and a clearer head (though a somewhat cloudier moral record), she walks slowly uptown, passing brownstone after brownstone, ducking under untrimmed tree branches, wondering what types of trees these even are and how many New Yorkers would know that answer. 

Miranda is running her fingers across tree bark when it appears, eureka!, like a mirage on the other side of the street: 49 West 70th Street, the white, varnished duplex that contains all her intrigue. If this is where the Woman lives, it’s a far cry from the hovel Miranda once imagined. In her head there was a dingy basement, dilapidated ceilings and old Chinese food cartons strewn about like asteroid debris around a crater; a Lisbeth Salander-type in a room glowing green from the ambient computer screen. Would’ve been weirdly situated in this part of town, but even in her wildest dreams she’d never have expected this. Spiral staircase swank? Resilient petunias growing on the windowsills. An expensive crystalline chandelier hanging visibly through the many wide windows, easily seen even from out on the street. Good for her, this Woman with Red Hair, but seems against type.

Unperturbed, Miranda climbs the stairs, rings the bell and puts her premature judgments aside, holding her breath until a shape shambles to the door. Miranda’s left hand reaches into her bag, grabbing tightly the goggles inside. She’s brought them as proof that she is indeed the requested savior, Miranda Swami. Not that there could be much confusion. She’s one of a kind.

An elderly smell of lilac and lemongrass rushes forth from the opening door like an excited dog, catching Miranda off-guard. Behind it, thin, poofy blonde curls and emerald eyes, an aged frailty in the face around them. A confoundingly familiar face, and a neck encircled by a black, wrought-iron key on a necklace.

Where has she seen this person before? 

Why does she know this face?

Back just before her Eldred L. Apple exhibition opened, when there were professorial rumblings of a certain powerful art critic’s desire to come christen her exhibition, Miranda, preparing for a chance encounter on a sunny side-street, memorized this face, knowing that with socialites of a certain sort, flattery and recognition are as compelling a currency as cash.

Judith LeMeur smells like you’d expect, like she sleeps among dried flowers and plays bridge on the promenade. She looks Miranda up and down and groans “This better be good.”

“Ju-dith Le-Meur?” Miranda chokes out. She should have known.

The lady looks at her as if examining the contents of a week-old compost bin. “………Why?”

“I should have known. I should have known.” Miranda says smiling, taking a step forward. 

“Young lady, I do not know who you are or what you want, but if you take another step towards this door, I will call the police.”

“No, no no no. You don’t understand. It’s me. Miranda Swami!” She takes the goggles from her bag, holding them up as proof.

Judith LeMeur raises an eyebrow, but still this strange girl stays smiling, holding a piece of shabby grey plastic up to her as if as an offering. Then she begins closing the door.

“Miranda Swami! Ma’am. You know me!”

The door hesitates, three-quarters closed. Behind it, LeMeur says to herself “Swami…Swami. Swami. Wait, yes, yes, I know you. You’re the girl who stood me up at the Apple exhibit, aren’t you?”

Is this a test? “Oh, uhm, unfortunately yes, Ma’am. Completely on accident, though, for what it’s worth.”

“Well, I don’t know what you’re doing here…” LeMeur says, trailing off. She rolls her eyes and sighs, internally acquiescing to something. After a long moment, the door opens fully for Miranda to step through.

“You may hang your coat there beside the umbrellas.”

In the hall, LeMeur says something about tea before coaxing Miranda into a broad, eccentric parlor (at least that’s what a more learned socialite might call the room) directing her to a seat nestled at the intersection of two sienna walls. LeMeur leaves her for the kitchen, giving Miranda ample time to appreciate what appears to be a deliberate collection of post-modern finger-paintings and taxidermic animal skulls in glass cases. Miranda fidgets in place, somewhat shaken at being the only living thing in a room full of just-abouts. The chandelier, giving off rich, luscious light, sways slightly overhead, as if taunting poor Miranda, a creature so low to the ground.

Unsure whether her patience or her tenacity is being tested, Miranda waits, and waits, and waits for LeMeur to return, until destiny demands to be taken in her own hands. The rest of the house, as she peeks around the corner, is dark except for an amber glow coming from down the hall, which is where Miranda finds LeMeur halfway done with a mug of amber tea, the kitchen reeking of potpourri.

“So, young lady,” LeMeur says without looking up, “you stood me up at your gallery, and now you’ve stalked me to my home. Why is it that you and your generation all believe you’re at the center of the universe? In my day, if we had a meeting with someone we needed to impress, we arrived twenty-minutes early with a new suit and new haircut. And if we were late or, say, forgot to show up altogether, and if, say, someone felt strongly put off by us thereafter, we took res-ponsi-bility for our actions. We did not show up unannounced, looking half-murderous on their doorsteps.”

“But, Ma’am, didn’t you —”

“Hush. However you got this address I do not care to discuss. Charles — Professor Gillibrand — knows I would have him killed if he told a student where I lived, so I can only assume it was through the uncouth means available to your kind. You ‘millennials.’ But, Miranda Swami, you are here and since you did not take the ample opportunity I gave you in the parlor to more seriously consider leaving, you obviously have something to say, so please, out with it.” 

“May I sit?” Miranda asks cordially. 

“I’d rather you not.”

Miranda isn’t sure whether to snicker or sob. “Ma’am, maybe I got the wrong impression, but I thought that you invited me here.”

There’s no sound worse than the kind of mocking chuckle LeMeur mockingly chuckles just then, between sips. “And what on God’s green Earth would have given you that idea, girl?”

And that’s a wrap folks. That last comment is going to just about do it for our fair Miranda Swami. She’s had a good run, but Option A: that the resident of this apartment is the Woman with the Red Hair, officially rejected.

Though Option B: use Judith LeMeur’s IP address to try and regain access to the Program, officially still possible.

And don’t sleep on Option C: forget this ever happened and beg Father for a ticket to Europe, officially pretty appealing. Whatever option she will eventually choose, its first step will involve getting out of this continuously-more-embarrassing conversation as soon as possible.

“Ma’am, I’m so sorry, I must have misunderstood something.” Miranda applies her phoniest, most sycophantic smile. “Didn’t mean to waste your time, so I just…I’ll be going now.”

Promptly, she turns on her heels as if to walk out of the apartment. But LeMeur, the lilt in her voice perhaps a bit too sardonic, calls out, “Oh, is that it, Ms. Swami? Just going to run away? Scared out of your wits by an old woman and her jasmine tea? I thought you would have more fight in you. Truly, I did. But no, that’s fine, you took a chance coming here and obviously it’s not going your way, so just flee the premises. Isn’t that what you Millennials do? When the going gets tough, you just vanish, poof, right? Better things to do and all that jazz, hmm?”

Honestly, there’s only two things LeMeur could’ve gone after just now that would demand Miranda Swami’s retaliation, and one is making an affront to her Millennialism. Curmudgeonly old bitch. So, Miranda does what any good Millennial would do when some septuagenarian, thinking they’re unique or revelatory in their disdain for the youngers and not just unwitting prey to the same recurrent generational opinions that have plagued the aged since there first was an aged: she turns right around and claps back.

Okay, boomer.

“I don’t think that’s fair at all,” Miranda says.

“I figured you’d think that,” LeMeur replies.

“Do you think you know me? Know us?”

Oh no. Oh no no no. Miranda doesn’t realize what’s happening. She doesn’t understand that LeMeur hasn’t really been drinking tea, but has actually been digging a hole, filling it with spikes, and carefully laying it over with an underbrush disguise. This is a trap, and Miranda’s about to step right in. And she knows it, too, can sense it. But, sweet thing, she can’t resist.

“Sweet Pea,” LeMeur says, smiling so wide you can see each one of her 32 pristine, ghostly-white teeth. “I know you better than you know yourself.”

“Do you really believe that?”

Metaphorical knuckles set about cracking. “Do you really believe you’re that unique? Here’s what I believe you are: habitually late, unkempt, white…like so many of your generation’s ‘artists.’ I can tell by your hair that you’re queer, by your eyebrows that you’re angry and since you can’t stand still for a moment, I assume you’re probably off abusing a well-intentioned Adderall prescription. So yes, Ms. Swami, I do feel I know you.”

“Ms. LeMeur, saying you can tell I’m queer by my hair is, pardon my language, fucked up. What the Hell is wrong with you?” Miranda’s getting righteously, and rightly, angry. Enlivened hair jumps off her head and sticks to her sweaty forehead. She’s beginning to itch. All these extraneous variables just make her angrier.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, are you very offended? Spare me a lesson in civility, dear. I’m well aware when I’m being incendiary, I’ve been doing it a long while now.”

“Ms. LeMeur, I don’t know if your arthritis has kept you from getting on a computer anytime in the last ten years, but that kind of demeaning, belittling, marginalizing attitude isn’t really acceptable any more. Like you’re so important. Like your opinion matters so much. You’re just an art critic. What do you know about anything else? About us? About me?”

Easy, Miranda. See what’s going on here, girl. Through Miranda’s entire red-faced tirade, LeMeur sits stoic, taking quiet, polite sips of her tea, exhaling the steam through her nose.

“God damn it!” Miranda continues. “Every angry, unkempt, imprudent queer has a different and equally valid story to tell. Get the message?” Miranda has to catch her breath. She is at the mercy of something stronger than her restraint. “And-and-and and, but you’re famously gay, for Christ’s sake! That was like your thing! And now what? You’re going to adopt this patronizing attitude because…because why? Because my sexuality isn’t the thesis statement of my life? Because I’m not going to let you define me by it? What are you? Bitter? Don’t you see what you’re doing?”

LeMeur takes a very, very, very, fucking excruciatingly long sip of her tea. Very long and very loud and positively slurpy, followed by a nice, proud lip-smack. And she looks up at Miranda, smiling.

“Miranda Swami, listen to me carefully. First of all, do not deign to tell me what it was like to be a homosexual in this industry these past decades. You have no idea. None of you have any idea. You know, maybe I am angry. Because in a lot of ways, I envy you desperately. Desperately.

“I never wanted to be a critic, you know. My initial foray was into artistry, in fact. That was vital, for what it’s worth. Investing myself into art helped me greatly in time, for I believe all great critics have to have a background in the art they critique, otherwise how would they know? How would they know what it’s like to throw your soul into something, your very being, to try and coax people to listen through your work? How would they know? The greatest critics have an understanding of that, an empathy that is absolutely vital to truly understanding a work, be it of value or not.

“I was an artist and it was the 60’s and suddenly there was this wave of acceptance for everything. You could sleep with who you wanted and think what you wanted and decry the government or God, and it was all okay. There was freedom for everyone. The blacks had leaders making real change while the long-haired hippies had their, you know, Woodstock music. Bully for all of them. But no matter what I did, no matter what I tried, my art, my career, my life was always trapped in the shadow of my sexuality. I didn’t have a choice. I was a queer artist, and all of my art, my criticism, my trips to the corner store reflected that.

“Look at you. You call me a ‘famously gay’ critic. Why in God’s name does that have anything to do with my work? With my criticism? Why is that the factoid about me you can pull from your subconscious? Imagine that. Try to imagine. I did not shy away from my sexuality, I leaned into its totality. For the greater good. So that one day, you and your generation could live a life freed from that bondage. I did all of this for you! My sexuality was a sacrifice. For you! What you are, what you get to be, I did that for you. Me! And yet you come here so self-important, nursing your sexuality like it’s a war wound, holding it tight as if someone is trying to take it from you. I gave up my freedom, my choice, for you. And you squander what I gave you. You squander it and scream bloody murder when I do not conform to your strange little understanding of what it means to be gay. It means something different to me, young lady. You exploit this thing of yours. It becomes you. And you suck what you can from it because, and this I tell you true, because you can shrug it free at any point. But you choose to look like that, to make art the way you do, to bathe in it and decry your marginalization.”

She says this all in one almost-uninterrupted thought. So many times does Miranda want to interject, but the words can’t be cajoled out from her throat. They hide fearful under her tongue. Her brain is mush, and no matter how she plumbs its depths, she is not able to find any sufficient words of retaliation. They will not come to her for weeks, until she is standing in the shower, thinking about what she’ll have for lunch, when the full experience of this moment will erupt from underneath her cerebral cortex in full, flashy detail. It will come over her like nausea, and she will vomit up all possible responses, the obvious and the witty and everything she should’ve said that she’ll never get the chance to. But for now, She stands stricken and silent, knowing, knowing, that she did this to herself. She poked the bear.

“And on top of it all,” Judith LeMeur continues, “you were late. So, let us recap, yes? Trite of skin, exploitative of sexual orientation, lacking in experience, talented but entitled. A statistic. Why is it really that you have stalked me to my home today? Murdering me here would be a highly cliché act.”

And Judith LeMeur, bitch extraordinaire, smirks. Her smirk has a sound, like a whip being cracked, like lightning rending open the sky, a far, faraway sky. It’s not even clear if she believes what she’s saying. Whether she’s right or wrong is beyond the scope of either woman. It’s not about homosexuality, about exploitation, about imprudence. No. This is a generational argument beyond morality, beyond correctness, beyond themselves. This is a spokesman battle of souls, and whose is stronger, and who has earned theirs more.

Miranda says, “There is so much more to me that you don’t know,” in a voice strong but quiet, like timber.

“Yes, I’m sure, my dear. I’m sure. And what is that exactly?”

A cloud descends upon Miranda. A cloud of fear and angst descends upon her shoulders, a tight scarf that constricts around her throat. It’s a familiar scarf, one she wears often, always enjoying its automatic adornment. But a tiny, ardent light from her cerebellum fires itself through the cloud, and Miranda finally blurts it out, without any of the conviction or grandeur with which she always imagined she would. 

It comes into the world squirming, a meager whimper is all it is.

“I’m Gwami the Seer,” she putters quietly.

As LeMeur takes a deep breath in, the kind of breath that precedes a speech, Miranda repeats the words in her head. I’m Gwami the Seer, I’m Gwami the Seer.

She’s never said those words aloud.

As LeMeur embarks on a fresh soliloquy, Miranda meanwhile feels the pressure in the room change. There’s a minute shift in the air and also in her skin; everything becomes sharper, clearer; she can hear individual bird calls. It’s obvious she’s set something in motion just now, revealed something not only to LeMeur but to the random, eavesdropping universe.

Miranda, who has been staring off into the middle-distance for who knows how long, looks back at LeMeur, who appears to have been talking this entire time.

“…and it doesn’t really matter who you are, Ms. Swami. You could be Henry-bloody-Kissinger made youthful by secret serum, and you still wouldn’t play to anybody but the coffee-shop crowd over on Astor. And do you want to know why?

“Because no matter who you are or how you say what you say, you’re still saying the same boring, trite, tired things everyone’s always said. You are a statistic. So, why don’t you kill me now or come back when you’ve got something new to say, if I’m not long dead and buried by then?”

The rage drains from Miranda, as does every other emotion. There’s been a sea-change, a cooling, a chilling out of everything. She has to concentrate carefully on her next movements, for they must be perfect.

Okay, Miranda. Easy now. Act angry, yes. Storm out without a word, like she’s broken you. Great job. Get out of this room before her old, weak legs can lift themselves up from the table. Let her shout after you, let her make all the noise she can. Grab your coat and be noisy about it, take your shoes in your hands and give the door a nice, firm slam.

LeMeur’s old, weak legs do eventually get her up, get her down the hall, and get her to the door. Her old, weak hands ensure the door is securely shut, lock the deadbolts and mortises and fumble with the final fat black lock that requires the key around her neck. Those hands arm an alarm system, adjust the security camera angles, basically do everything but let the Doberman out of the cage, and that’s only because Judith doesn’t own a Doberman. She’s terrified of the beasts. She does spend a not-insignificant amount of time checking her security cameras before bed, staring at her patio and front porch both, feeling somewhat scurvy about that girl who accosted her earlier, though she can’t quite remember the details of what they discussed, only that it was engaging and infuriating in equal measure. This hazing over of memory is normal when confrontation works her up. The cameras are somehow less enthralling than you might think, and even LeMeur eventually gets bored. It’s with her alarm-clock reading 9:58 in the PM that sleep swallows Judith LeMeur, her favorite 24-hour shopping network tuned into, her ever-weakening body protected by three layers of heavily-locked doors, and the windows are barred.

But none of that matters, because Miranda Swami, all this time, was hiding in the front hall closet. Ain’t no camera in there. Although hiding is perhaps too confident a word. She was quaking, hyperventilating, making herself small within the space. Holding in her breaths and her urine and waiting for the mumbling, light-footed old woman outside to climb the stairs and head off to bed. She was too scared to even use her phone, terrified that an errant Instagram video might loudly give her away.

If LeMeur had found her in here, she would have had to make a quick choice between failure and felony. That wouldn’t suit anyone.

After much quaking and shaking, waiting and hyperventilating, she exits the closet into the darkened house. With each step through the halls, no matter how careful they are, the nearby frames on the nearby paintings shake lightly, as if not completely secured to the wall. Miranda wonders if LeMeur ever lets outside help into her house…She can’t possibly have done all this decoration herself.

Miranda steals an aerosol can from the bathroom and sprays it down the hall in case of crisscrossing lasers.

But there are no lasers, nor guard dogs. Anyways, LeMeur’s paranoia is a rampant but fundamentally ignorant one, one that believes locks will save the soul, that believes safety in the home is the only safety necessary. Poor Judith LeMeur, investing in fresh locks every week, unlisted in the yellow pages. Yet Miranda Swami needed just a few days of impersonation to pull her address out of a string of digits she got from a man in a computer game. Safety is relative.

Safety is relative, and Miranda pokes her head around corners and carefully opens doors, all in an effort to find that elusive space ubiquitous in the homes of Boomers-and-above: The Computer Room. There’s the kitchen and a pair of seashell-themed bathrooms that really don’t belong in a house like this. There’s a thick door letting in a slight draft which must lead to a garage, and a laundry room/pantry stocked with all kinds of dog and cat food, though Miranda has not seen or heard a living animal in her time here. And there are plenty of locked doors, too. Like, an aggressive amount of locked doors. Should Miranda flounder in her initial search, there might be secondary heists to consider.

The “computer room” is all the way at the end of the thin hall past another first-floor bathroom. Somewhat ironically, this door remains unlocked. Fully open, in fact. Miranda can’t help but feel bad for the critic: a key worn around her neck for safekeeping, and still not quite cunning enough to keep out intruders.

Inside the room, which Miranda carefully closes and locks, she discovers that LeMeur is one of the much-mythicized last people in the city with a desktop computer, and a serious clunker at that. It’s a beast, a blocky, tan monstrosity you’d find in some early-90’s government lab, a computer that looks like it’d eat her phone if she brought it too close.

Wait, she’s seen something like this before.

Oh, shit. She is in the right place.

Chills, the shivers. Butterflies in her stomach. This is happening. This is actually happening. She, Miranda Swami, has trespassed into the house of one of New York’s most influential art critics, has set up shop in her computer room, has ensured that the door behind her is locked, and that the window there is an unlocked and practical emergency escape route, is preparing to use her Neolithic computer as a portal to another world. Conveniently but confusingly, that computer’s startup is a fully silent process. These old computers, the proto-desktops, some of their settings don’t just defy convention, they defy logic itself.

A password prompt causes a mini-panic, but remember: LeMeur is a woman in her early-seventies, so the password is inevitably written on a post-it stuck on the screen’s southwest corner. It’s almost like she’s inviting strange folks to peruse around her online life. Anyways, Miranda’s in, and there’s nothing left to do but what she must. The goggles wrapped around her face, the heartbeat in her chest thumping as powerfully as it ever has, Miranda connects a cord and falls through a familiar rabbit hole.

There’s the familiar dot matrix, and the familiar dissolve of blackness to color, and finally the familiar hallway. A familiar black box in the center of her vision, and into it, a recently-memorized and now-confirmed IP address enters itself. The black box disappears, the code accepted. Miranda didn’t realize she was holding her breath, but lets it go. It was the key, after all. The IP, that is, not her, uhm, her breath.

Instead of moving under her own power, Miranda is nostalgically whisked around a corner and another and then, down a twisted, monstrous corridor. This is just like the first time she was here, except that, woah, whatever turn the Program has her take, it’s one she’s never taken before.

The walls become bare and then haggard; stripped of their wallpaper and ornaments, once-covered cracks breathe digital air for perhaps the first time. Picture frames lie shattered and empty in the crease between floor and wall. The Program itself looks to be falling apart. Splintered floorboards reveal holes to nowhere opened beneath her, and there are no more doors flanking her either, just the walls with their black cracks, an empty nothingness behind them: nothing programmed, nothing existing. This, a walkway at the center of a void.

And at the end, a literal light at the end of the tunnel, a whiteness needing neither password nor button command to enter, just an open door-sized rectangle leaking straight-up starlight. Miranda is pulled through. The path forward, open and awaiting her inevitable steps. Calvinism proves alive and well within the Program’s tangle.

Miranda expected to find Her seated upon a throne. Something gaudy, grand, baroque. I mean, wouldn’t you? But it seems like the Woman is going for a more Nativity-Scene-type-thing, which explains all the hay bales and the barnyard sunlight throwing smattered stripes across the floor. Christ himself would have felt right at home in the early-morning glaze, encircled by Three Wise Men, like the Woman with the Red Hair, her face still cloaked by shadow, is by the European Men from the bus stop.

The photo-realism of other worlds is ignored here: the details fuzzy, the frame-rate choppy. Look hard enough and you can even see the pixels; amateur work. The light doesn’t’ reflect correctly, there isn’t any floating dust, nor even a trace of varnish on the barn columns, and behind the slats in the windows is only this lazy, abject brightness. It’s exactly the kind of unfinished place that would drive away any too-lucky soul who happened to stumble in. In that way, it’s a fitting safehouse: devoid of detail, just barely functional, and only just.

One of the Europeans tongues an extensively ashy cigarette, the smoke rising up in ambient ripples before surrendering to the same low-res crappiness as the room around it.

“Hello,” The Woman with the Red Hair says, as the men disperse to the corners of the room and then into thin air. “Can you hear me all right?” Her voice is like balsamic, so sharp and tart and syrup-thick. It’s one of those familiar voices, a voice like you hear in dreams, one that seems to be all voices at once.

“I can,” Miranda types back. Her heart is beating so hard she can feel it in her tongue.

The Woman sighs. “You’ve made it.”

“I have.”

“You’ve finally made it.”

A pause.

“You didn’t make it easy for me,” Miranda says.

A long pause.

“I couldn’t have. I wouldn’t have known it was really you.” 

There’s a real tension. Something isn’t being said.

“Well I’m here.”

Miranda wants to say more, has so many sentences to speak and questions to ask, but the words for them have gone. Some after-effect from her conversation with LeMeur, must be. But really, what should she even say? What could she? It’s the Woman’s turn to speak, and there’s nothing more desperate than texting out of turn.

“Yes, you’re here,” the Woman says, finally. “You’re really here.”

And then, it’s as if a divine knife falls to slice the tension. Sliiiiiiice. The Woman careens herself onto the floor, letting forth the wild squealing of a trapped animal. “Oh, thank God!” she screams (Miranda has to readjust her headphones). “Oh, thank heavens, you’re here! You’re real and you’re here to save me! You, Miranda Swami — Gwami the Seer — are here to save me! To save us!”

There are weeps, true, trembling weeps coming from the Woman’s prone body, but they soon become quiet or far off, like their producer has moved away from her microphone.

“Are — are you okay?” Miranda asks, suddenly sheepish…suddenly scared. Imagine God appearing to you, inconsolable and in tears. You too might feel a certain shiver.

“Yes, yes, oh yes,” the Woman finally says, “I’ve just, just been so nervous and afraid, oh so, so afraid, for so long. And and and it all depended upon you. But now you’re here, and they said it couldn’t be done, they said it wouldn’t work, but finally, because you’re here, I see a path forward from out of this Hell.”

“Wait, what’s going on here? You said you had information on Big Banana, you said Cindi Lapenschtall was…this was all about…aren’t you going to help me save Gwami? I’m not here to save you.”

“But but but, Miranda Swami, you already have, just by coming here! Nobody else would have done all that, persevered so long, searched and searched, out there and in here, disregarded so much else in their search for answers. So clever, so cunning. I thought it was you, was 99.999% sure but needed definitive proof. I knew it. I knew you’d be just like I imagined. In my dreams, you always were. Strong, smart, so sharp-witted. I’ve been watching you of course. Not the whole time, but, well, a lot of it. And you were willing to sacrifice yourself for her. Every impasse, every near abandonment of this whole escapade…you always came back for her. For me. For us. And I-I-I had to be sure it was you. It could only have been you. It could only have been you. I had to be sure. I had to make sure you were committed.”

“I’m so confused. Did you design this whole place for me?”

“Miranda. What happened to you, to Gwami, it was all a stunt. What happened to Cindi, it was a stunt, too. A devilish trick, I swear. It was all marketing!”

“And?”

“And? And? And what!? This is it, Miranda Swami, finally you and I are together, working towards a common goal. Can you imagine what people would’ve said about this, like, two months ago? It would’ve set them on fire! The entire world has been preparing for our partnership and now —”

“‘Our?’ Who are you?”

The perpetual shadow over the Woman’s face begins to lift, and a Cheshire Cat smile opens along her jawline. A prearranged swelling of orchestral strings starts low and rises up, reaching a crescendo as the Woman says, “Miranda Swami, don’t you see? Don’t you know, can’t you tell? I’m Cindi Lapenschtall.”

But you probably knew that already, didn’t you? Something about twists.

“Well,” Miranda says finally, trying not to offend Cindi (whose famed beauty is much diminished with all these blocky-ass pixels) with too quick a response, with too inexuberant a heartbeat, but her capacity for awe has been diminished in all the hubbub.

“What now?” she asks, genuinely uncertain.“What now?! It’s me: Cindi Lapenschtall! Former CEO of Big Banana! And you’re Gwami the Seer! Fallen Queen of the Internet! Digital Lucifer! Maybe that’s not the best metaphor. What now? Now we work together! To bring down the company that wronged us! The both of us!” The music slowly fades, eventually settling into its place as soothing, quiet ambience.

“I don’t understand…” Miranda starts to say.

“What’s not to understand? They framed us! They faked my death. It was probably some intern they threw off that building in my stead. I honestly don’t know. But I was wise to them, some friends helped me escape their clutches, thankfully, but if I showed my face after that, I would’ve been killed. And I thought about going public — I think every day about going to the police or the FBI — but they have everyone in their pockets, you know, EVERYONE, the heads of so many companies and all the authorities. It’d be actual suicide. I’ve had to be so so so careful. And if I were to suddenly reappear in the wrong way or without enough attention on me — I mean they can change the news cycle like that, so I’ve had to be careful, and that’s why I’ve invested so much on the infrastructure here, cuz it’s very invite-only and I’m the only person — well not the only person who can invite people on, but you see it was about creating a network totally outside of them, you know, and that’s why it had to be here I brought you, somewhere safe and away from them, but getting there, here, away from them, was so much harder than I thought which is crazy, CRAZY, because I was their CEO, right? But I was always just a face and there’s no way —”

“Wait. Please. Please slow down.” Miranda’s in a tizzy, tossed topsy-turvy by the tsunami of talk the trembling teller touts. “What are you saying? That there’s like a shadow company within Big Banana? That you, Cindi Lapenschtall, built this place to escape them?”

“Oh. Yes. Of course. You don’t know? Well, you couldn’t possibly know, I suppose. Oh, this is so overreaching of me, so characteristic — Easy, Cindi. One thing at a time. — so yeah, okay, let me start over. Or, you know what? We’ll skip to the end and double back. A classic trope. Watch this.”

Behind Cindi, the barn wall disintegrates into dust, swept away by a supernatural broom, leaving a black screen where it once stood. A flickering video appears atop the blackness, old-timey-like with the countdown reels: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

In the grainy, security-camera video that plays thereafter, eight hooded figures encircle a flaming trash drum in a warehouse, and Miranda feels the hair stand on the back of her neck. Even the crappy surveillance footage, tinged blue by tungsten light, eclipses the most hyper-realistic CGI in quality. The video has an ostentatious realness to it.

“Bring it out,” Cindi says to the screen. Then to Miranda, “You better pay attention; we can only show you this once.”

A moment, then the slow-approaching sound of rollicking chains, and with it, the snarls of a livid, lashed animal. There’s a guttural note in the animal’s raving, a hollowness if you will, just like you heard that one time when you were a kid, remember? You brought your ear up to the hole in the trunk of that old Oak behind the abandoned McGillicuddy place and you heard something, yes, you heard something, but it was way down the hole and though you were only hearing the reverberations against the grain of the bark, it was still so terrifying, so chilling to your very essence, it made you run, nay sprint, right home…and you’ve never really stopped thinking about it.

At first, stillness on-screen, then a pair of robed arms, their exposed wrists white and veiny, and the bodies they belong to, and it’s all happening so fast, the bodies and the wrists and then, into the center of the circle is heaved something that can’t possibly be real, can’t possibly exist like the wrists and robes and the flickering flame-tips on the wall-mounted torches do, but what choice does Miranda have but to believe what she’s seeing: in the center of the dark, fire-lit circle stands, shrieking and enchained, complete with furious, red horns curved like a steer’s and a pointed tail (God, please let that be just a tail) whipping around in a gorgon frenzy, a very human-sized Banana, its yellow “skin” browned in spots by some assumed physical torture (it’s the only explanation for all those icky brown lumps and the open, oozing slits along its phallic abdomen) and obscured by the video transmission, which has grown fuzzier the closer this Banana — this Banana — this Banana — thing, comes.

This demon. This Banana Demon.

Because that’s what this is, right? What else can this be but a demon? Cindi never has to say it and Miranda never has to come around to the idea. What she always knew was rooting around in the bushes at night, making them rattle, and what she had always thought punished unruly children post-tantrum, what kept her from staying out after dark and cheating on her exams, the thing that caused all that, could it really be a Banana? A FUCKING BANANA!? God does apparently have some sense of humor. God, that is, or the Devil.

A robed figure comes forward into the center of the circle brandishing an enormous, bejeweled sword, like from some geometric table legend, moves their lips in apparent prayer, dips the sword into the flaming dumpster until the blade turns swollen and orange and black and glows, too. In one expert, practiced motion, the figure raises the sword to shoulder height and brings it down, slicing through the very air before slicing through the center of the writhing Banana. Miranda, half-sick, hopes horribly it’s just some unfortunate kidnapped soul in-costume. But because its top half slides off of the bottom half with no blood, just a smattering of pulp, she can’t possibly believe it to be so. The halved body sits on the ground for a moment, grimacing, and then disintegrates into a kind of wet sand, pooling on the ground.

There’s a pair of loud beeps, and an overeager Roomba enters the frame, headed full speed for the mush on the floor.

Cindi waves her hand and the feed cuts out. She turns to Miranda. “So, you see what I mean.” 

“What — what in G-g-god’s n-n-name w-w-was th-th-that?”

“Most Big Banana employees, my dear. The whole R&D department, most of accounts, like half of the mailroom. And all of marketing. Well, not all of marketing. There are some straggling pencil-pushers in there, smiling faces like, oh you know, what are their names? Your roommates? Sweet girls, very nice, preeminently forgettable, certainly not demons.”

“I just, just can’t…this is all some kind of joke, right?”

“Miranda, listen to me. Big Banana, everything you said about them, all of it was correct. They’re an evil corporation, literally full of demons. I was a figurehead, that’s it. I’m not sure why they needed me but I, I had to…They made me an incredible offer. I couldn’t say no. Maybe this whole situation is my punishment, but if it is, it should only be me being punished. They’re run by demons, Miranda. The rest of the Board, all of them are just like that thing, if not in appearance then surely in attitude. They’ll destroy anyone to get their way, I’ve seen it happen. And it’s frankly unjust.”

Miranda says, “I think my appendix is bursting.”

“You’re just freaking out. Deep breaths. Please, breathe, I know how frightened you must be.”

But maybe she doesn’t know exactly, because it isn’t just fear gripping our dear Miranda, it’s complete, horrifying, soul-sucking existential dread, like you might feel after you hit a pregnant pedestrian with your Prius. All of life and death, all the accepted rules of the universe that have hitherto governed life mercilessly retreat from before her, sucked from her brain as if by divine Dyson. Too many questions, too many vast, unanswerable questions about origin, about Christian Hell, about that preacher Caleb took her to see…

And yet, of all the questions she and we are both desperate for answers to, the one she actually asks is, “Why Bananas?”

Why Bananas, indeed. Cindi Lapenschtall, voice raspy from her own hyperventilation, goes off on a tirade about the fate of the universe’s soul (which is long and rather rambling, but what she essentially says is this: Miranda, those demons you were always afraid of, they’re as real as you or I. Why they chose bananas as their unifying symbol, well who in the holy Hell knows but Satan himself? Long ago, they trafficked in pelts, then people, then coal, now bananas. Who can trace their logic, or if they’re even capable of logic? Nobody knows where they came from, how they’re here, what they are, or what they’re goal is, but don’t be a dolt, you saw the damn thing, they’re obviously bad news, and they’re here, certifiably here; I’ve seen them flying, shape-shifting, sucking the aortic veins of livestock, doing all sorts of downright demonic things, driving motorcycles, going to the dentist, and all of your worst fears are true.

But the scariest thing of all? Thus far in history, nobody has been able to do a damn thing about them. They wear their historical invincibility like chainmail. I’ve been inducted into an order — those kind folks you saw on that screen —, fast-tracked into their upper echelons, become privy to the losing battle they’ve been fighting for all of history, it seems.

But things are different now. I know they are. People can be reached on such a grand scale. All humanity can finally be united against a common foe. We don’t know if we can beat them by force, especially with the extended length of their payroll, but I think that if we engage the culture correctly, if we let the culture take down demons as they might take down poorly-timed Oscars jokes or celebrity child molesters, if we are allowed to discuss and debate and argue and incite and joke about them, if we can make them another ordinary evil, we might destroy the very fright, terror, and taboo they peddle in. At best, we’ll take away their power. At worst, we’ll make them uncool. And to be uncool, unwanted, laughable…that’s a form of powerlessness).

“They’re going to announce a new CEO. Next Sunday…that big countdown timer on the Statler building? It’ll go off and then they’ll announce a sudden festival at the Bash to unveil the new figurehead they’ve chosen to lead them into the future or whatever, some poor sucker who probably got reeled in with the same lovely promises of wealth and influence and acceptance and pride that I did. Someone who’ll sooner or later be pushed out of a building themselves.

“But you and me, we can start something. There’s a whole plan in motion, you’re just one part of it. I’m going to get another one of those Banana things, my friends and I will bag one up, and we’ll livestream the whole thing, the show and the execution and it’ll be me up on that screen personally blowing kisses to the crowd, and, and, and that’s where you come in, because you’re going to promote the hell out of the whole thing. You’re going to go reactivate Gwami — I know, I know, but hear me out — you’ll do that and then go live, stream the entire announcement, and the whole world will tune in because they haven’t heard from you in so long, and because you’re promising something big. They think the war between you and Big Banana is over; they’ll bite the bit to witness the next battle live and di-rect. After Big Banana cuts their own stream, which they will, it’ll be you who broadcasts the rest of the video to the world. You leave the technological aspect to me. I can get up on that screen, I know it. You just get in that crowd and stream everything through Gwami.

“Miranda Swami, you can be a part of the greatest coup in human history. Paradise fucking found baby, you ready?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Good question! Ah, not really. This isn’t your narrative anymore. You’re just riding along, the eyes and ears. This was never really your story.”

Cindi could have said nothing more pleasing, more relaxing, more releasing. What could be more relieving than stepping outside of her own story for a second into something grander, larger, more complex, where Miranda can be a mere mechanism and not the mechanist?

It seems like the whole universe is chanting her name in cheerful solidarity of her newfound purpose.

“Gwa-Mi! Gwa-Mi!” it says in a voice that sounds like a thousand voices. Miranda smiles in two worlds. “It certainly sounds like my story.”

“What do you mean?” 

“My name…”

“What about it?”

“Don’t you hear? You mean, you’re not doing that? Like the orchestra? Isn’t this —?”You remember our talk earlier? About how the cogs of the internet keep turning even when not observed? Well, suffice to say, they’ve been turning. Something rank grew in the petri dish overnight.

From Cindi, inside the goggles: “Miranda, what is happening?”

From Judith LeMeur, upstairs: “What in the holy hell is happening out there?”

From Miranda, inside the computer room: “Oh my good God.”

From a mass mob, outside in the street: “Gwa-Mi! Gwa-Mi! Gwa-Mi!”

And then, Unknown, through a megaphone:“GWAAAAAAMIIIIIIII!!!!! WE KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE! COME OUT AND FACE US!”

Pulling the goggles up to her forehead, Miranda finds the room has caught an eerie orange-yellow fever, the surfaces lit up in bush-fire hues. Through the window, she sees the glow of their actual torches, a mob of people a few-hundred-strong, many of their faces masked, their many voices amplified by bullhorn.

From an open upstairs window, LeMeur shouts “I’m calling the police, you degenerate lowlifes!”

Then come her great, frantic footsteps bounding down the stairs. Judith LeMeur, Violent in her Nightie vs. 200 Bloodthirsty Internet Trolls.

Fight!

While the members of the mob cry for Gwami to surrender herself, while Cindi screams desperately in her ear — “If you need me, @ me! Whatever happens, @ me, and we’ll come find you!” — Miranda tries to work out the logistics of squeezing through that back window there and then landing without any broken bones. In a flash of panic, Miranda stabs the computer’s CPU with her left foot. It emits a death groan as the screen swirls to black.

Judith LeMeur screams back at the crowd through a slat in the door, the sound of her voice muffled. Some elected speaker, assumedly the mob’s leader, offers retorts from the spiral staircase on the landing.

“Is Gwami the Seer in here?”

“Why in the…Seer be here?” comes LeMeur’s voice.

“We were told by a trusted confidante that this is where we’d find her.” 

“Don’t be a fu…you…”

“Don’t call us names!”

Comments of that nature continue on. Miranda would stay and listen all day if she could, but it’s clear now she misjudged the window’s dimensions, and the hot, growing thickness in the air portends all sorts of badness.

Though the crowd’s ringleader must see that a woman of LeMeur’s age and temperament — “You think I’d waste my time with that politically-charged drivel?” — couldn’t possibly be the Seer they’ve come to accost, and though the folks in “charge” of the march or protest or lynch mob, or whatever this is, are obviously considering retreat, some imbecile in the mass, feeling strongly about action in the face of uncertainty, hurls a rock through one of LeMeur’s wide downstairs windows, which is cue for the rest of the mob to ignore their better judgment and the denials LeMeur keeps on screaming and the increasingly frightened yelps of their leaders to “Stop! Stop! Get back and stop!” and march zombielike onwards towards the house, pelting it with beer bottles and rocks and whatever else is nearby — uprooted plant stems and plastic-wrapped newspapers. And there’s some gnarly Dubstep coming from a boombox in the center of the the mob — fights begin erupting within it — and the screaming and the throwing and the shouting increase tenfold as the crowd turns its relentless hunger inward towards itself, meanwhile all the windows up and down the block are lighting up yellow and orange as the residents within them — those not paralyzed by the classic Upper West Side fear of pandemonium — jam the lines of the local police precinct. All this happens while LeMeur becomes more desperate, nonsensically remaining at the door, trying to reason with the riot.

She’s saying “I’m not Gwami! I told you, I’m not Gwami!” at anyone that will listen, dodging the debris of tossed banana peels (you can’t make this shit up) before an idea overtakes her, something prompted by a few words she was told not a half-day ago, and the cries of “I’m not Gwami!” become “I’m not Gwami, but I know who is!

“I’m not Gwami, but I know who is!

“I KNOW WHO GWAMI THE SEER REALLY IS!”

The Mob Leaders, not so much struggling to restrain the riot as they are annoyed by the rapidity of its devolution, try quelling the crowd with their bullhorns. When some control returns, they allow LeMeur to continue, even bestowing upon her a megaphone with which to really get the message out there.

Which she does, going on to tell them all about the girl who stalked her here earlier, who came so rudely knocking on her chamber door, some NYU artist with a downtown gallery at the Eldred Apple Building — “Did you get that? El-dred App-el.” who, upon being told more-or-less that she’s never going to have a career in this town, offered up some very interesting information about a certain alter-ego that may be of some note to all of you.

And that is all Miranda will overhear.

While the stalling Judith LeMeur offers up that very same pertinent information, the girl in question outraces the mob to her apartment, having left the goggles in a panic and ducked out a back door, hopped over a fence and jumped on the nearest subway, home now and gathering up everything vital to her continuing survival — computer, phone charger, a couple of unread Marilynne Robinson books in the event of extended unplugged boredom, proper electric toothbrush, underwear, tampons, contact solution — and fleeing in a state of mental and physical disarray to Penn Station, where she’ll board the next possible train south to New Jersey, where a bus, god-willing, will take her to a proper hideaway nestled deep in the crossed arms of the coast. There, sanctuary awaits her arrival.

Sanctuary, and maybe funnel cake too, awaits her at the Jersey Shore.