“Already?” Georgina chirped with her hands balled together. She tucked her thumbs into her fist, squeezing against the bone.
“That was fast! I thought it was supposed to take twenty-four hours,” Ben said to his wife. Knowing how quickly Georgina could startle, he asked her, “Ready for this?” He reached for his phone which had first illuminated in a blush blue but had already receded into blackness, its glittering notification faded with melancholy.
Ben swiped up on his phone and looked at the picture.
“It’s not—” he said. Georgina released her thumbs but still kept them burrowed in her fist. Any excuse eluded him.
“Let me see.” She grabbed the phone from him. Her thumbs, out of her fists, rotated in minuscule circles on the phone’s screen, zooming in and out while panning left to right. The image was in the same style as all the photographs all over the news and social media: photographed directly above the subject’s head, a completely elevated selfie from the sky itself. The subject held her long arm above her, making her head look too small. Next to her face, which gazed with widened shock, was a screenshot of Ben.
“It’s you,” Georgina said.
Ben craned his neck to look at the screenshot within the picture. “I don’t have a beard!”
Georgina furrowed her forehead as she read the post below the photo.
Just got my FF post… i post this in 5 yrs after this creep YANKS MY HAND DOWN HIS PANTS AT A WORK RETREAT… thx FF. #bengarfield #mesoon.
They looked at each other; Georgina gripped the phone tighter in her hand. “She used your name,” she said.
She said it again: “She used your name.”
Slowing down like a musician who doesn’t know how a piece of music will end so just stops playing, she said, “She used your name.”
Ben’s focus was not on the picture of what appeared to be himself with a beard or the girl’s face in the post, but her three-letter acknowledgment—thx—unsure if it was typed with sincerity or sarcasm.
“It’s not—it can’t be true,” Ben pleaded, dropping his phone. The screen dimmed again to black.
“What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything! It’s the future—” he stopped, unsure how to explain the technology, the app, let alone the logic.
“This can’t be real. This is a joke?” She wanted to sound assured. “I don’t understand—I—.” She rose and left the room. He heard the closet door open and then the front door open and close, the Indian bells they purchased online glittering against the door.
“You don’t understand?” he shouted after her, knowing she would not hear him.
He rose and approached the window facing the street, filled with the night. She really had gone for a walk and not just gossiped on the phone with all her friends, her vape pen illuminated like a blue eye. If they were going to make any real traction as newlyweds, they would have to talk to each other (exactly what the therapist said!). He returned to his phone, to scrutinize the post again. If Ben zoomed in, he could make out a scar above the bearded man’s right eye, similar to Ben’s own scar. But it also could be a blur. He clicked #mesoon and saw the stream of posts everyone had seen for six months. When this had all started eighteen months ago, few people Ben knew—including himself—imagined that their FuturFoto would portend an international sexual harassment marathon.
He found a video (nine minutes long!) of a kid also caught in the #mesoon mess.
“To my future victims,” he began from the front step of his home. His eighth-grade graduation banner was visible behind him in the doorway, “My mom helped me write this letter. I don’t know what will lead me to hurt so many—”
There Ben stopped. He looked out the window again, looking for Georgina. The clouds hid the stars, but no rain had fallen yet. Their neighborhood was enveloped in blackness, like they had all been crammed into someone’s pocket, muffled in addition to blinded. The immutable past—filled with its documents of violence—had announced the incorrigibility of the future, breathing into it some unholy sentience. This unfairness—in his own home!—led him to consider all of social media’s men: backpedaling, qualifying their responses, or not responding at all.
“This can’t be,” he said, looking to where Georgina had gone. He would not assault some woman in five years; he didn’t know her; he wouldn’t meet her; he would avoid her; he would respect her; he would only grope her if she wanted it. He would not limit her or his potential of a beautiful life and he refused to have his potential for success challenged by a fallacious claim from the future which held no evidence and which—yes! he now understood it—did seem to upend freewill and predetermined a hostile future, implying his ostracism, but—ah! here’s what only he understood—FuturFoto allowed him to choose a path: he knew precisely how to avoid this if Georgina could withhold her judgement until he had the chance to figure out—
He opened the front door and stormed to the edge of his property, demanding to know when she would return. He considered sending her DNA into the app, seeing how she liked getting wrapped up in some scandal that she supposedly couldn’t prevent. He refused to believe any of it because the fallacy of FuturFoto is it could all be prevented. Of course! This was a good thing (he wished he could laugh about it). If she would only come home, he could demonstrate his freewill to her. He ached to see the dumb glow of her vape pen—the way the future illuminated itself in formally analog things. Ben never felt like a Luddite, but suddenly he missed hand rolled cigarettes, CDs, and cookbooks. Suddenly he craved a world he could touch, a world where he didn’t spit into a USB port to learn about his future. He wanted the past’s hands all over him, to pull on him and expel him into some ancient form of ecstasy.
What started as mere strings of water around him thickened into ropes of rain then balled into pellets: a barrage against him and his neighborhood. This hail had been predicted and he had ignored it, ignored it still as a shiver violated him.
Georgina’s shadow was bouncing through the night toward him—the blue glow of her vape pen at her hip—her hood down as she ran past him. He could not hear the bells glisten as she opened the front door, but did hear her shout his name. She yelled it again, moving into the house. She was in the back of the house now, their bedroom, inaudibly calling for him.
He slogged through his yard like it was not cluttered with hail. He cycled through the normal responses he made to their fights. He eliminated those options until he had no ideas; in such vacancy he felt his future—his real future—take shape with this simple solution: if he could surprise her right now, then he could surprise her in the future.
He returned to his house and closed the door slowly to muffle the bells. The shattering hail smothered the squeak of his shoes as he descended the hallway, her shadow stretching out from their bedroom. He drew one breath in before he leapt out at her with a growl and she screamed and hurled her vape pen at him, the cartridge turning in the air so its heavy end collided with Ben’s eye. His head jolted into the door frame which he did not hear crack as he collapsed headfirst into the ground. They had never replaced their hardwood floor with carpet. He was conscious, but he was dazed and his wife sounded faraway, as if he were still outside.
Within him a pain resounded like a sharp hum and he thought of a gong, if it ever stopped reverberating. Her voice was becoming clearer; he could discern her scolding tone as she yelled his name, as the pain seeped into his soul. But he would expunge this pain, yes, he would hurl it at somebody else.
