Three nights, gone, wasted away in double-time, panning for the right thing to say like a gold prospector, as in process of elimination. Not that it was fun in a way where time grows wings and sweeps you away. More like how, when you’re defusing a bomb, the breath between one second and the next disappears until the timer’s just licking its thumb and skimming through numbers.

This is what I need: one word, one sentence, one set of sharp clippers to the right color. She’ll see me, hands two inches from the detonator for her, and everything on her side of the screen will be real. Then, I don’t know. The thought gets away from me. She reaches through the screen and clambers into my lap like a less jailbait-y version of that girl from The Ring.

Cursor over the phone icon. When I hit dial, I’m colorblind as I’ve always been.

May answers, eyes red and puffy, makeup streaked down her cheeks. I see her grief and I’m breaking dishes on the floor, tearing out the drywall, fully apeshit.

She flexes her cheeks to smile. Her eye bags bulge. “Herk.”

Some screen names are true screen names, meaning you can’t read them out loud without cringing at the sound. I never used my real name because it never came up, and I grew up during the heyday of stranger danger alarmism. And then she was the only person who ever called me that, like, with her mouth, and it opened up a pocket universe where we could disappear together. My real name doesn’t do us justice. I’m something else when I’m hers.

My reflection in the screen lays neat over her, and my shirt is dark enough to contrast each and every crumb built up around the collar. And listen, I’m a guy who cares about his hygiene, but dropping off my laundry upstairs always entails another argument with my mom, and I couldn’t risk a distraction.

“You look really beautiful today,” I say.

“Dude. I look busted.”

“It’s okay. Nothing I haven’t seen before. You’re still really pretty.”

“… thanks.”

She worries at her lips, purses them, turns her face to the ground. She’s not usually this fidgety. Today is the only day she’d let someone see her like this–unkempt, vulnerable–and I’m the only person she feels safe enough to show.

I met her as a client to the tune of 3 figures a month, and I fell in love with her as a chat moderator, where we called it reasonable for my payment to be a free subscription. We keep a professional distance because we’re both career-driven like that. She doesn’t really respond to my messages unless it’s complaints, updates, or ban logs, and if she was somebody else, it would read as distaste. But she’s good at saying things without saying them. She bats her eyelashes, she covers her laugh with her manicured nails, and we soak up the hungry, itching implication of something more.

Think about it like she’s some big movie star and I’m the bodyguard in the background of her red-carpet photos and nobody knows who I am until I make headlines for stopping a kidnapping or assassination attempt or whatever. While she does her thing, I man the trenches, digging through thousands of usernames, weeding out every failed abortion who even thinks about her wrong. And we stand ten feet apart because our contracts say to, but when we lock eyes, our spirits are chest to chest.

“Sooooo… how are you feeling?”

“Nervous. Which is like, duh, of course I’m nervous, but, y’know, I’m nervous.”

A quick ‘welcome back’ to the pit in my stomach and it’s on with Operation May.

“I mean, it’s–”

“It’s a big deal, I know,” she says.

That’s not what I was gonna say. I had in mind something like, it’s okay to change your mind. Even if somebody’s got a gun to your head and they’re threatening to kill your family, I can keep you safe if you change your mind.

“Well, yeah, it’s definitely a big deal.”

“It’s kinda like a rite of passage. Like my pornstar bar mitzvah.”

“A rite of passage?”

“Well, you know, passage to the ‘other side’.”

I want her to think she’s funny. I try to laugh and wheeze instead.

She continues, “but yeah, a lot of people I knew did it. Really, it’s a good thing. Means I’ve reached the height of where I can go with all of this.”

She gestures vaguely to the room around her–everything is pink, including her, including the parts of her she’s not showing me right now. She’s got a pile of stuffed animals taking up more space on the bed than she ever could. Her furniture is custom ordered, and you won’t believe what color it is. A few accents, the canopy’s lace trim, are secretly white, but the LEDs mask it.

“When you put it like that, you’re essentially getting punished for succeeding,” I say.

I don’t think the LEDs could make it look pretty if she follows through. The cops, not known for their delicacy, would just drag her body out, piss and shit and all, and there’s no hiding the stain she’d leave on her bedside rug.

She shakes her head empathically. “That’s only if you think about it like a punishment. I don’t.”

“Well, the death penalty exists for a reason.”

“And the death penalty is super fucked up! What does that even have to do with anything anyways? Are you…”

I’m not mad at her for yelling. The way she’s feeling, the hormonal warp-drive, the last thing I want is her directing it inwards, so, in a way where I’m still not happy she’s yelling at me, I’m relieved I’m the one receiving it. And she’s lucky I’m collected enough to handle it.

“I’m sorry if you’re feeling upset, hun. I’m here for you, I know this is really hard for you.”

She sniffles, wipes her nose with the back of her hand.

“Yeah. It’s, uh… it’s rough.”

Hearing the tremble in her voice, my heart breaks, kept functional by my stoicism. She’s begging me in her own way to help her out of the mess she’s made, and I’m always there for a woman in distress.

“Do you know how they’re gonna do it?” The words are chalk between my teeth.

“They said it’s not actually snuff if I know. But also like who is checking for that, right?”

“Isn’t that kind of scary, not knowing?”

“I don’t think so. The worst part of pain is anticipating it for me, and this way, I don’t have anything to anticipate.”

“But you said you’re nervous. About the pain?”

“I’m trying not to think about the pain, actually. Whenever I start to think about the pain, I just meditate.”

“Meditation is a placebo effect.”

She stiffens up.

“Then didn’t you just ruin it by telling me?”

If I keep backing her into a corner, she’ll do what animals in corners do. Freeze up. Fight back. Slip into some recitation about how feminism is actually selling your body to strangers on the internet, the kind of infographics she posts online, the force-fed faux-reactionary dribble coming straight from the big guys running the show. They, the industry executives, they love it when girls fall for that shit. The girls start self-checking their own allegiance to their pimps and the pimps raise a glass.

“I have a question.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Yes?”

“Did you, um, did you have to, like, get your things in order? Like, a will and testament, or whatever?” It’s horrible to say and I’m making it up as I go. Truthfully, I only care about her answer insofar as it can stall her.

“I didn’t have to do it if that’s what you’re asking. I also just didn’t do it.”

She comes back to yes or no questions with so much. Maybe she’s also stalling.

“Why not?”

“I dunno. Didn’t feel like it.”

“Well, it forces you to confront what’s happening. I can see how that might be difficult for you.”

“Yeah, I definitely don’t think it’s that.”

“What do you think it is then?”

She shrugs. “Didn’t feel like it.”

Which is classic, you know, that feminine avoidance. I’m bleeding out chances for her to escape, and she’s wiggling through the gaps, and I’m wondering if love means anything to her. I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t, or if she didn’t know what to do with it. Most girls in her work only do it because they got touched as little kids or walked in on their parents. They go into the job with all the love inside them fucked up beyond recognition.

We sit, not in silence. Somebody’s spamming me on Discord, asking why they got banned from our server. I force quit the app and shuffle the garbage around on my desk.

“I’ve been reading chat recently. People are upset. They don’t understand why you’re doing this.”

“Who is people?”

“Chat.”

“Oh,” she says, mirroring me, playing with something on her desk. “Damn, I’m sorry.”

“Why are you sorry?”

“Modding must be a pain in the ass right now.

I don’t know why the point fumbles the landing so hard. Her last day on earth and she’s taking time to pity me of all people.

“It’s not about that. I just thought you’d want to know.”

“Why would I want to know?”

Whatever she was holding clatters.

“Because it’s important to know how they feel.”

She huffs. “I’ve seen chat too, you know. A lot of people are actually excited for me. And even if they weren’t, they’re really not involved in this. I wouldn’t make this decision just for other people, m’kay?”

“I know, don’t take it like that.”

“How else am I supposed to take it?”

She’s getting evil with her tone. I take a breath, reset, remember her feelings control her more than she controls them, particularly right now.

In all honesty, I do want her to take it like that, though. I know how much this involves her fans. This is a career decision, and her career is her fans, I mean.

“They’re loyal to you. They’re lonely men whose entire life revolves around a 20 by 10 screen. I know you can’t imagine what that’s like, neither can I, but can we both rationally consider the aftermath? You… go away, their screen goes empty, and there’s nothing. They’re cold and empty husks. TLDR; what do you think happens when people don’t have anything left to live for? They kill other people, or themselves.”

“You’re saying I’m gonna second-hand murder people if I die.”

“I’m not not saying that. This isn’t to hurt your feelings, May, but have you thought about that in any capacity?”

She picks at the trinkets next to her monitor. I spin around in my chair. The pink light casting off my monitor wraps around the human-shaped pile of clothes on my bed. The swimsuit Hatsune Miku on the wall is a different shade of pink too. Everything’s fucking pink and everything’s fucking May and cards are hitting the table left and right and she’s fucking aloof. I spin back around.

“Does your family know?”

She stares, eyes centerless, at her keyboard just to avoid looking at me. She knows I’m here to change her mind, there’s not a woman in the world dumb enough to think otherwise, and now she can’t bring herself to face me. Like my face gets her heartsick the way hers gets me. Beyond heartsick, actually. Some things are just fated, I’ll admit that as an atheist. This is about, like, cosmic balance or something. This is so much bigger than us. Than sex.

It’s massive and only getting bigger.

I have to tell her I love her.

Not because she doesn’t know. It’s completely redundant. I have to tell her I love her because she can’t look away from it.

“I need to say something.”

She murmurs some noise as permission.

“And I know this will hurt to hear right now, but we have to say it while we still can.”

She’s clicking a pen off the desk.

“May, are you listening to me? I love you, May.”

She looks up, but not at me.

“I’ve loved you for so, so long. You’re my world. And I can’t let you do this without you hearing me say that. I can’t let you go through with it not knowing I love you more than I can physically handle. It hurts me. It wounds me how much I love you.”

She grimaces, and I know she’s really listening. She opens her mouth to say something. The video feed freezes like that for a second.

“You don’t have to say anything. I know how you feel. I know it’s hard for you. It’s hard for me too. Just tell them you can’t do it today, May, just today, and then I’ll take you somewhere they can’t hurt you. I’ll keep you safe.”

“Oh God.” She buries her head in her hands. “Don’t say that.”

“I have to. It’s my job to protect you. That’s what we do when we love people. You’ve protected me in your way, now it’s time to let me do the same.”

She shakes her head violently. I can’t make out what she’s saying to herself. If we were in the same room, I’d take her hands in mine, wipe away her tears, hold her against me with all my strength. I’d let her cry as long as she needed. I’d soothe her while she did.

She rakes her fingers through her hair, pushing it behind her shoulders. “Listen–”

“No, don’t say anything, just think about what I said. Please.”

“Let me talk,” she insists. “I… I appreciate you.”

“I appreciate you too, May. I appreciate everything you’ve done. You’ve worked so hard and played your hand at a career and I appreciate that. I think it’s time for you to be human now. We can be humans together.”

“I appreciate you,” she repeats through her teeth, “but we’re not like that. I don’t even know your name, man.”

“Jake, my name is Jake.”

It just comes out of me, this rough and foreign thing.

“Jake and May. It’s got a nice ring to it.”

“Okay… well, Jake, that doesn’t change anything. I still don’t know, you know, like, your favorite movie, your favorite food, what songs make you cry, the important things. I don’t know what makes you laugh. I don’t know what makes you smile.”

“You make me laugh, May. You make me smile.”

“No.” She sits back in her seat. “I make you cum. That’s… those are whole different worlds. Do you understand how they’re different? You don’t love me; you love what I do.”

“How are those different at all? It still means I love you. And I do love you.. I think about you all the time, and not just about sex. I think about waking up and you in the kitchen and you smiling at me and we eat pancakes or whatever. I think about coming home to you and the baby.”

“A fucking baby? We’ve never met face to face.”

“Face to face is overrated, we don’t need that shit anymore. I still know everything about you. I know what perfume you use. Your favorite color is pink. You always put your hair up because you don’t want it in your face. You love kid’s stuff, like the cartoons and stuffed animals.”

“Jake… this isn’t actually my bedroom. This is what I’m saying, dude, you don’t know anything about me that you learned organically, through a real conversation or by spending time with me. You know what you can see through the webcam and that’s where it ends.”

She stifles a laugh.

“And my favorite color is green.”

Hot cheeks, throat lumped and metastasizing to watering eyes. I wipe my face with the collar of my shirt, squeeze shut until neon green specks dot my vision.

“Let me learn.”

I fight the urge to be mean, and the struggle makes my voice weaker than it should be.

“Just give me the fucking chance to learn at least. It’s not fair for you to get mad at me when you never gave me a chance. Of course, I didn’t learn anything about you from a conversation, you didn’t want to talk to me!”

She flinches from the volume, like she’s the victim. I should’ve expected as much.

“Christ, May, I’m not mad at you. I can’t even do anything if I was. I’m just saying, if you gave me the chance, we could have something good. You can’t go and kill yourself before we get to try.”

Her eyes have never been so beady.

“Actually, I can do that. That’s what I’m doing.”

Stalemate.

And what am I supposed to do? Somebody has to win, that’s how the world works. When there’s no move left to make, it becomes a game of concession.

I’m tingling or hurting in my hands, like pins and needles, like low circulation bloated.

I can’t just concede. My resolve pools heavy in my stomach, mixes with acid and semi-digested food, comes alive as something caustic and frothing. It dissolves a string inside me, and the string snaps. I snap. I tell her this is stupid, she’s stupid, or like she’s not stupid, Jesus Christ, I didn’t mean you’re stupid, May, you know I didn’t mean that, I mean you’re being stupid right now. She stares at me and blinks. I tell her that I know it seems cruel, and I apologize for that, but I tell her she needs to hear it. Nobody else loves her enough to be blunt. More blinks from her. I keep going, I remind her that, holy shit, you’re doing all this for porn. I tell her she’s not like fucking Joan of Arc or something, this isn’t martyrdom we’re talking about here. This is porn. That she’ll die, and it’s going to be painful, and all it’s gonna be is porn.

When I’m all out of words, she clears her throat and steeples her hands.

“Thank you for your concern,” she says. “But you’re not gonna change my mind.”

The silence comes crashing down like a meteor. I wish it was a meteor instead.

“Did you want me to do something? Anything in my job description?”

I’m about to throw up on my monitor. “No. I just wanted to talk to you.”

“Okay. I’m gonna go be with my family.”

“This is goodbye, then?”

“Yeah. Bye, Jake.”

 

May falls off her chair a couple times during the stream. Just gives up and goes limp and melts down onto the floor, where you can only see glimpses of her behind the live chat, which is superimposed over the video feed’s lower third.

There’s a fishhook in my windpipe the whole time.

It’s more violent than I expected, although I didn’t expect to end up here at all. Both of us in a basement, dying slow. A gun would’ve been merciful. Or a chainsaw.

In the top right-hand corner, there’s a scoreboard for highest donations. The top three users have medals next to their names. They’ve donated a sum $21,042.

The chat unanimously cheers on the enemy. I recognize some of the usernames as frequenters from May’s streams. People send thousands of dollars in single donations so they can pick a weapon and how it’s used. Nobody tries to stop it. Nobody bothers pointing out how fucked up it is. And I’m pulled out by the tide, a faceless username among the swarm.

But I do my best.

The guy with the skull balaclava is ready to swing the sledgehammer again.

I send ten grand for them to stop.

There’s another feature in the stream where any donation over a thousand dollars gets pinned to the top of the chat until supplanted by another donation. So now my message is lording over the chat, where people are already chanting DONT STOP.

He smiles into the camera.

His teeth are the only thing unstained.

He apologizes, says thank you for the money, but I’ve just wasted all those sweet dollars.

He swings.

Everything converges into this moment. This singular frame of the stream; May in the chair; the skull balaclava guy twisted at the hips like he’s playing golf; the sledgehammer making contact with May’s collarbone; my username with a gold medal next to it in the top right-hand corner. And on top of the chat, displayed proudly with a golden banner, ‘HERCULESHERO sent $10,000: plz stop’.

This is my ten-thousand-dollar failure, and you can immortalize it in a single screenshot.

Somebody does. Get a screenshot, I mean. And because it’s the internet, the screenshot breaches containment before the stream’s over.

Discord messages roll down the side of my monitor. People asking IS THIS U LOL with a series of emojis meant to express contempt. I open the messages and there’s the screenshot, with a red circle around my username. As if the golden banner wasn’t calling enough attention.

Then it’s not just people DMing the screenshot, it’s people DMing links to Reddit posts about it. It’s on r/NiceGuys, r/cringe, for some reason it’s on r/AsianMen with a three-paragraph rant about fast-twitch reflexes and the white male savior complex.

It’s fucking viral.

I brush my teeth, and when I get back, there’s an Atlantic article about a Times Square billboard getting hacked. The photo accompanying the article shows hundreds of people, faces turned to the sky, glowing under the screenshot on the billboard.

Another billboard hack in London. Then Tokyo, Dubai, Sydney.

The stream ended thirty minutes ago and ABC News is doing a sit-down interview with the FBI Director about it.

The anchor folds her hands into her lap, cocks her head, and plaintively asks, “How could this Hercules Hero just let a poor woman die? I mean, even a child would’ve known to send more than ten thousand. Do you think he has an intellectual disorder?”

The FBI Director nods thoughtfully.

“You know, this whole thing has basically got D.C. stumped. We’ve never seen an individual this repugnant before. Obviously, we can’t give any kind of definitive diagnosis without talking to Jake, but…” he leans forward into his elbows “… I can say for certain that this is the biggest American tragedy since 9/11. Maybe ever.”

And then the anchor and the FBI Director start talking in sync with each other, and their voices are the exact same.

“May was a pretty girl, like fuck was she ever hot. And she wasn’t one of those stuck-up pretty girls who know how pretty they are, May was always humble. She was our Lady Liberty. That’s who died here today. And now that liberty is dead, people shouldn’t be surprised to see a steady decline in… well, everything. And the bottom line is that this Hercules fellow had one job, and he failed.”

I’m watching the broadcast, I guess. I don’t remember putting it on, but I’m watching them swivel their chairs towards the camera. They look into and through the lens, straight at me.

“Are you listening, Jake? Are you listening to us?”

They keep asking, over and over.

My legacy is my ineptitude, international and high-def. All these people know me, and they don’t even know. They know what I couldn’t do.

May is gone.

So, it’s the funerary motions. I take down my posters, shove them into a box, and tuck the box under my bed. Without them, the walls are decorated with unpainted spackle again. I throw my clothes onto the floor, where they meld into other clothes I threw onto the floor before. The smell of cement and dry rot leaches from the walls.

The heat wave does nothing for me. I go to bed wearing a down jacket.

In my dreams, I’m standing over May’s grave, chanting in tongues. Her hands burst through the dirt without fingernails. She clambers forth, all putrefied and still pretty, and it’s awkward the way first meetings are always awkward, when you know somebody in and out, but you’ve never known them in this context, close enough to touch, too scared to speak.

I ask her what I should say. I’m on my knees, clinging to the back of her knees, begging her to tell me. She looks down at me and opens her mouth. Nothing comes out.