The article stressed no medical evidence had ever been found. It still hasn’t, as far as I know. Maybe it’s been hushed up in the name of progress, I don’t know; I think to become a world-class conspiracy theorist you need to have an implant. It would take too long to piece it all together without instant access to a zillion statistics. Imagine researching something like that in paper archives. It makes you wonder how the human race got anything done before the arrival of the Internet.
I suppose that shows my true colours. I hate being different. I would have the implant back again this instant, if possible. If it didn’t trigger a migraine that left me incapable of doing anything than lying in a darkened room and making owsounds.
I remember what it was like to have the world in my head, and I miss it. I miss knowing what everybody thinks about everything. 200,000 likes for the photo of the cake I baked for my aunt’s birthday party. 680 reviews of the new ebook from that author I like. I didn’t have to leap blind into any decision-what coffee shop, what colour lipstick, what food to give to the cat. The friends in my head made those decisions for me. If they hadn’t heard of it, then it wasn’t worth knowing.
Now I’m alone. And I have to be brave. I have to be the person that walks into the metaphorical party with the sneaking suspicion that her dress is rucked up in her knickers. That is my life, every minute of every day.
Wait. Not quite. Once a week I still have friends.
***
It’s half past five on a Thursday, and that means I can walk out of this hotel lobby and make my way downtown to my self-help group.
“Friends” has become a word of myriad meanings. Instead of defining “friends” as “people I’ve never met with whom I have formed an online connection based on similar interests and extended peer groups,” I define it here, traditionally, as “people who live in the same geographical area as me and are as miserable as I am for the same reason.” I think the original definition of the word is long dead, and nobody except me seems to be mourning it.
I reach the café a little late; I see my group from the outsider’s point of view, which is an unwelcome reflection on how stupid three people with their heads wrapped in tinfoil can look. I would take off my own, but it does cut down on the headaches, nausea and dizziness. Really, it does.
I nod to the barista, and he smiles, and blinks, and starts to make my decaf Americano which I really don’t need after the scene with Jake, but it’s hard to sit in a café and not order anything, particularly when all the other customers are staring at you and posting pictures of your tinfoil-hatted group on Facebook with a witty caption or two.
I sit down, and Len, dear Len, asks me, “How are you, sweetheart?” I blurt out my bad news, and then am unable to speak further due to a tight throat and the fear of bursting into loud, uncontrollable sobs. It may be a self-help group, but it’s always had more of a polite conversation vibe than a collective and open pooling of misery vibe.
“Oh no!” says Deb. “No no no. Oh dear.” She’s so lovely, always commiserating, and refusing to accept sympathy for her own large array of problems, such as diabetes, a slowly dying mother, and having to survive on a government-funded budget of sixty-seven pounds a week.
“He’s a moron,” says Tom, who is young and huge and pierced at regular intervals. Eliza throws him a suspicious look. Tom and Eliza have recently become a couple, in a tentative sort of way that’s painful to observe on a week by week basis. Occasionally they hold hands under the table and we all pretend not to be aware of it.
I let them wash me clean in their sudsy sympathy, and it’s quite a pleasant experience until we get to the rough towel-dry at the end, where I’m meant to stand back on my own two feet again and come out buffed from rebuff.
“I-we-always felt that he wasn’t right for you, Taylor. Maybe you’re really meant to be alone for a while.”
“What?”
They all shuffle back in their seats, a collective response. “We all think you could do with some time to yourself,” says Eliza.
“The meaning of discussion groupis not that you all take it in turns to discuss one of the members when she’s out of the room,” I tell them. “The meaning of discussion groupis-” No words come to me. If I had a link, I would search the online dictionary and find an amazing answer, and spit one out with vitriol to look sharp and sassy and so in the right. But there’s nothing.
Len takes my hand and squeezes it. “Poor thing,” he says.
He’s right. I am poor. We all are. We live in an information poverty, where we can’t ever be as good as the people around us. We won’t get jobs, because they are all advertised online, and everyone applies in their head. We can’t complain to our MP because she only accepts tweets or emails. We can’t escape because the car tax system involves being registered under a valid username and the bus and train timetables are all PDF docs. Buying a ticket is done with the blink of an eye, anyway. It’s all a blink of an eye away.
I close my eyes.
Tom murmurs something, about how I’ll be fine, and I’m tough, and Eliza agrees with him, and changes the subject. Soon they’re having a normal conversation around me, as if I don’t exist. As normal a conversation as people wearing tinfoil helmets can have.
***
I lie in my four-poster bed that night, under my foil canopy, and think of Jake, and the digital interest he is no doubt generating at this moment. The clear lens of the world focuses on him, and he loves it. He probably told his publicist he was going to break up with me two weeks before he told me, just to make sure he’d get the most surftime from it.
And yet, and yet-what? Surely he is indefensible. But if his way of life was offered to me I would take it. Wouldn’t I?
Jake and I met at a deserted monument to the past-an art gallery. A Mondrian exhibition. We stood side by side, strangers, in front of “Composition 2.”
“The lines looked different in my head,” Jake said, and I said, “Nothing’s the same in anyone’s head.” I thought we were alone in that room, sharing a private moment. Later, in bed, he said to me, “You make life feel more … personal.” That was what he loved about me-I was unaware that there were 3,000,000 people in our relationship.
And the reason I loved him? The opposite. Because I never felt alone with him. He was my clickable link. Through him, I connected.