This time Livia couldn’t restrain herself and began to weep. Dusty went to her and the two cried together.
“It’ll be frickin’ scary but I think it’ll be amazing. I know it will be. I even reached out to Laura Poitras — the gal who did the Snowden movie? She’s amazing. I’m not sure she’ll do it but I think she’s definitely intrigued… The timing might be good because she’s kind of taking a hiatus from the heavy shit. Did you know she spent years worrying they were going to break down the door and arrest her? Though maybe the critics will arrest her, after she does our little film!”
“I think it’s going to be really important, Dusty.”
“Right? Ya think?”
“I’m just so honored.”
“I’m gettin’ butterflies! You’ve pretty much been my therapy all these years, Liv. You and the foundation totally paved the way for this — I really think meeting all those kids was like… a rehearsal for meeting her. And… some part of me thought she’d walk through those doors one day — I think that was in my head, for real. Isn’t that funny? That I thought for sure one day I’d bump into Aurora… did I ever tell you that was her name?”
“No,” she said, with a mother’s tenderness. “It’s so beautiful.”
“Strange. That I never told you that.”
She said the name again aloud, like a conjurer.
—
Tristen, twenty-three, a slight-of-build outlier type with acne scars on his neck, but cute—nonstandard-edition cute. A Crossroads alumnus who ran with the Brentwood/Palisades crowd before getting outclassed, outlapped, outed, and outrun.
(His folks, fringy showbiz aspirants/below-the-liners.)
Back in the Ritalin folly of youth, a genius troll who called himself “AssDoxxtorFill” online — definition of doxx (short for documents) being “to search for and publish the private or identifying information of individuals on the Internet, typically with malicious intent.” He became a bandit anarchist on the 4chan imageboard’s wild and woolly so-called /b/forum, part of a rowdy nihilistic gang of hacks who called themselves “/b/tards.” In the electronic havoc of finding others, he found himself.
Do not ask for whom the /b/tards troll; they troll for thee…
Tristen made his bones in mayhem and sundry Web motherfuckery way back in 2006, not too long after All Souls’ Day, when a coke-bingeing teen 100-mph-joycrashed her father’s Carrera into a toll booth (troll booth soon enough) on an Orange County highway, becoming a legendary Internet phenom after CHP dispatchers adventitiously leaked official photos of the gory results to the Web. Nikki Catsouras’s goopy face, a work of abstract, accident-scene art in a pre-hashtag-days atrocity exhibit, had spookily retained its luxuriant hair, the superglued coiffure of a demon; her teeth cornrowed in the cranium’s middle like a double helix. The steering wheel, a warpy airplane travel pillow, collared around her neck, her skull resembling a child’s papier-mâché version of one of those spiritual bookstore half-bowl anthracite crystals. The dead girl was Tristen’s christening, his ritual coming of rage as a player in the genre called “RIP” trolldom — using a filter to deepen his voice, he rang up her grieving parents and impersonated an official who claimed to be spearheading an investigation into rumors that unholy acts had been perpetrated upon their daughter’s corpse by lady sheriffs and various family members of the coroner, and to assert that the body had been further, if virtually, desecrated by kinky Comic-Con aficionados, supposedly given access via premium morgue-camera pay-per-views.
Why did he do it? “For the LULZ”—definition of lulz being the trickster’s version of for laughs, i.e., same as LOL, but with the pirate flag of motherfuckery flying.
The Catsourases were too stunned to hang up, which Tristen thought awesome, because it implied no one else had called, not yet anyway, and meant he was surfing the first-wave riptide of pranks that would keep pulling the bereaved under until the Internet End of Days. He spent a week lovingly accessorizing a mannequin’s head Fangoria-style before sending it chez Nikki, having already mic’d a windowsill so that when Mrs. Catsouras opened the hatbox left on the porch (with a flowery card that implied it was a condolence from one of her daughter’s anguished friends), she flipped as hard as Brad Pitt at the end of Se7en. Tristen posted the wailing soundbite, a caprice that, to his dismay, caused him to receive a small but significant amount of shit from his comrades, whose self-touted fearless amorality apparently had its limits. Poseurs and hypocrites—they were turning into body-snatched TEDxTeen pussies before his very eyes…
He got bored, vaulting over Nikki’s cadaver to whitewater-raft the BitTorrents of spring—“spring” going by the name of Matthew, a thirteen-year-old who inexplicably hanged himself in Rochester, Minnesota. Valiantly struggling to process the senseless death, imponderable at any age but a jarring novelty to tweens, a clique of pubescent Matthew survivors crafted a poignant memorial page on MySpace, extolling their friend with charming ineptness, as if he’d been martyred to a cause. When they clumsily called him “an hero” (the eulogizer’s heart, if not indefinite article, was in the right place), an inspired meme was born: to RIP trolls, the boy hadn’t killed himself, he’d “an heroed”! So genius! The coinage should have been Tristen’s—envy soaked the un-Google-able recesses of his encrypted heart. In consolation, he designed GIFs on MyDeathSpace of a Matthew-faced Casper doing a floaty jig on a grave while being violated by a Sambo-looking golem. For sheer technical wizardry of slapstick execution, Tristen received high kudos from the very merry band of shit-disturbers — all older than he, and handsomer in their own ways — that had recently shunned him. The sins committed against the Catsouras mom were now forgiven and forgotten.
Yet another period of ADHD boredom ensued, and after all his crazy lone-wolf shit, Tristen was disgusted that he’d subsequently allowed himself to be seduced into hacktivism by the older, more-handsome-than-he manboys. (Their energy and scent was responsible for his acquiescence.) Dutifully, he became a mouse in Anonymous — a rat—all the while hating on the do-gooder, high-dudgeon politically correct exposés he got conscripted into: the sight of a Guy Fawkes mask was enough to make him gag. So he bailed again, holing up in his room at the parents’ to explore newfound Web-sex thirsts (how he met Jeremy), his doxxing dormant but for sporadic video-design work, hyper-real porn goofs for a seditious, star-baiting website called Celeb Jihad… carefully crafting a Kate Upton/Kaley Cuoco-bukkake-facial here, an Ariana Grande/Aubrey Plaza-jerking-themselves-on-the-bed there—
Then came the quantum leap, for which he’d remain forever, happily unattributed: the creation of an event whorizon, the great celebrity selfie-porn scandal of August ’14 AKA “the Fappening.” (Impishly named after fap, the onomatopoeic root of jacking off.) Tristen’s luck and good fortune astonished — so many others might have laid claim to that prize! So many others had tried … Embedded in the lining of the net, the Fappening’s birth had been inevitable, yet fate and history had chosen him to summon the lava flow of exposed taboo bodymaps — Jennifer Lawrence’s and lesser cousins’—that verily swamped Old Reality, engulfing the pristine, elitist coastal cities of the lascivious, clay-footed gods of TMZ. JLaw herself! Jennifer too had been chosen, but couldn’t wrap her head around the perfection of being the figurehead on the evolutionary supership’s bow, couldn’t fathom the ultimate privilege of signifying that dichotomy. Vain and addled, she’d mistakenly believed that Dior and Katniss and David O. Russell would confer immortality, immunity… they all thought they could be private whores behind the gates of gilded Beverly Park playpens. But more than their arrogance, what enraged him was the grotesque ignorance of it, the world’s denial of spiritus mundi and the shitstorm audacity of what was coming — what he, Tristen, had ushered in. They were all his age, yet still clung to the idea they could “own” their images, passwords, thoughts! The entitled, alt-precious, starfucking Lena Dunham even delivered a warning (to her constituency of Girls and girly men) that to view the cell-phone images he’d unleashed would be at one’s peril, for the act was equivalent to a sex crime. Her self-righteous Brooklyn shit was über-Orwellian: chubby, people-pleasing, exhibitionistic Little Sister Is Watching. Couldn’t they see it was the HBO Medusa’s gaze that would turn them to stone? And leave them in the dustbin of history?